The Set Back
A few days later my brother Nathan was over making his amends with me as he is currently going through AA (which has literally been a lifesaver and wonderful program - He has been sober for over a year.) While Nathan and I were in the basement talking about our past, present and future relationship, I had left my phone on the kitchen counter. Paul felt the urge to go through my email. When I came upstairs feeling positive from the heartfelt conversation with my brother, I noticed that my phone was open to an email from an ex-boyfriend. “What’s this?” I asked Paul. Ironically, Paul didn’t even know that that email was open on my phone. “Wait, what… that’s not even what I was looking at.” He proceeded to show me an email from 2015 - an exchange between Brad and myself. Brad asked if I had any interest in tutoring a student from his new school to which I replied, “I want IT, but not the tutoring job.” I also wrote about my summer plans in terms of my schedule implying that we would maybe meet up.
Fuck… I had told Paul that my affair with Brad started in 2016, but clearly this was evidence that it began even earlier. I eventually confessed that the affair started after a drunken end of the year party gathering in 2013 - three years earlier than I originally told Paul. I was scared to tell Paul the truth. Paul and I were on such a good positive path of healing and I had dumped all the honesty and trust down the drain even further. I even confronted Paul one night a few weeks earlier about texting Brad, even though I promised I wouldn’t and Paul had been so proud of my integrity because I never had done that before. It was a tremendous setback and now all the progress was ruined…
It's hard to overstate the nonchalance with which I picked up Sarah’s phone next to me and in plain sight searched for Brad’s name in her email. I present it this way because while I never really cared to look at Sarah’s phone in the past, seeing it as an invasion of her privacy, now I felt I had every right. I also was feeling better about the way we were communicating. Sarah had for the first time recently sat me down to tell me a truth she had been holding back. This was a text to Brad after the affair revelation. It was motivated by Sarah’s anger at the questions around the paternity of our younger daughter.
I truly did not expect to find anything. What I did find was probably the most hurtful thing I had come across to that point: actual evidence. An exchange between Sarah and Brad to arrange a meeting. I was only able to see Sarah’s side. After some reflection, it seemed she probably thought by deleting his response she was deleting the whole thread. It was enough to make me crumble all over again. The worst part of it was Sarah’s ability to make herself so available to him, saying for example, “I can do any day next week.”
I remember thinking that I would wait until Sarah’s brother Nathan had left to confront her about this new information. He was visiting and was going through the twelve steps in his recovery with alcoholism. We are incredibly proud of him. I did not think that Sarah would ask me about her phone being left open with a different but also mysterious email that I had not even been looking for or at. There is still some mystery behind the one line email from Sarah’s high school ex-boyfriend. Sarah gets very upset when I have asked about it.
By now Nathan had left. I remember leaving Sarah in the kitchen and moments later hearing a loud bang on the floor. The front door opened and closed and as I walked back into the kitchen, I saw one of our cars pull out of the driveway. Where was she going? What was she going to do? Is she okay? I began calling and texting. No answer, no response. Sarah wasn’t gone very long and I realized that she hadn’t responded because the loud bang I heard earlier was her phone hitting the kitchen floor after she threw it during her agitated exit from the house. This event reset everything and if on September 20th sadness was my most profound emotion, this time it was a healthy balance of anger and frustration.
The moral of this story is to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing, but the truth, despite how much hurt and pain it may cause. The communication progress we had made in those first couple of weeks was all shot to hell by leaving out the “whole” truth. Omitting the fact that the affair was longer than suspected was just as bad as the revelation of the affair itself. It pierced Paul straight through the heart yet again and left Sarah in a deeper pile of shame. Emotions spiraled out of control and the healing process had to reset from scratch. Paul was then left to wonder, “Is there anything else Sarah is not telling me? Any details about the affair? Any other guys this happened with?” And even though the answer is no, how could Paul believe someone that had lied straight to his face over the course of nine years.
