I had always loved being married. What I wanted was a happy home, a happy spouse. I had assumed after twenty years of marriage that this was true, we were happy. In our own way, in a way that suited our unique idiosyncrasies. We seemed to reach agreement on all decisions; not with difficulty, but with ease. “What should our marriage be like?” It wasn’t a question I asked. This was our marriage; this was a mutual process and this was the result we had arrived at after twenty years together. What I quickly learned was that it’s only true in a relationship with no secrets.

Are the secrets suddenly revealed? When the truth emerges, it can seem abrupt. Actually, the signs are there but they remain obscure. “How did you not know that your husband was having an affair?” it played on my mind over and over again in the days following the reveal. Is it because he didn’t want to face the obvious? No, it is because an affair is not always obvious to the spouse. No staying up No lipstick on the neck. No unaccounted time. No strange phone calls. Where was he supposed to look? My husband kept an eye on his and his family’s routine.

The routine was broken one day. I walked into his office and he was huddled over the phone, whispering into the receiver with a wide smile on his face. He had forgotten that I would meet him that morning. He looked at me while he was still talking on the phone and said, “I have to go.” The conversation was very friendly; My first thought was why can’t you share with this person that I’m here? When he hung up the phone, I asked, “Who were you talking to?” He stumbled and replied, “Nobody.” I replied, “You sounded like you were having a good time.” He then replied, “It was Elise.” My heart fell. Immediately, I started thinking, Elise? Elise moved two years ago. She was your secretary. Why would you be talking to her? I flushed with embarrassment and walked out of his office into an adjacent empty office. He followed me and closed the door. I immediately blurted out the words “Did you have an affair with Elise?” “No” he shook his head and said “No” again. I didn’t believe him, but I couldn’t conceive of him lying to me either. He had never lied to me before, why now? What I can do? It seemed so fundamentally wrong to accuse your spouse of having an affair, and yet there it was, the words hanging in the air between us. All I could do was leave to avoid the discomfort.

My husband called constantly for an hour. When I finally answered the phone, he said that he called Elise after I left. He told her that it was wrong to befriend her out of respect for me. He assured me that there was nothing between them and that he would end any further contact. At that moment, I believed him. I did not review the incident and often wonder why. I was on the cusp of discovery and hesitated. I can only say that the hesitation came from wanting to marry the person I knew and trusted.

Two weeks passed and the incident did not cross my mind again. So, I came home late one night and he had left his work email open and the inbox contained a message from Elise. As I took a closer look, wait, there were several messages over several months from Elise. I’ve never opened her email before, but I did this time. To discover the truth? No, to seek reassurance that it was just what he had said: a friendship. What I found weren’t steamy love letters, but messages with clues that were impossible to ignore. A note that ended with “I love it” and another that talked about how fun it would be to see each other at a conference.

The slow disassembly process began. I could feel the heat rising from inside my stomach spreading to dizziness as the ground seemed to move. I took several deep swallows and knew this wasn’t just a friendship. How could I ask? What was she going to say? I stayed up for three hours before I finally woke him up. Those three hours were endless. She could hear the clock tick as she tried to think of what she would do. I needed to know I had to know I lay next to him, repeating Elise’s name over and over in my sleep. “Please, please, just give me a night dream confession.” I begged in my mind. There is no such luck. Clearly, there was only one way to get the truth and it was from him. The passage from the entrusted wife to the unfortunate tormentor occurred rapidly. At three in the morning, I started crying. She woke up and asked me what was wrong and I blurted out, “I know you had an affair with Elise. Just tell me. Tell me now. This is my life and I have a right to know.” Dazed to wake up, he quickly replied, “I did. I did.”

I wanted to hit him and I did. I stopped hitting. I didn’t stop because I felt it was wrong. I stopped because I didn’t know what kind of violence he was capable of. At what point could he go from the wife who she thought was unkind to ask if her husband was having an affair to a cunning assassin? She didn’t know it, but certainly this act of confession called for an answer to the question. The more rational part of me won by jogging. I needed to have answers. The storm broke and the questions rained down. If you were our neighbor and you were unlucky enough to be awake, you would have heard the angry voices and yelling. We were the couple you hear late at night when the voices are so loud you don’t know which house they’re coming from. The couple so desperate they don’t care if you hear them fighting. If you were our neighbor, you would think that only the stupid and ignorant fight like this. We were that couple.

Suddenly everything stopped. “How long was the affair?” to which he replied “Four years.” The room started to swim and I started to fall. I was falling, but I was still on my feet. It’s not unlike that moment in Alice in Wonderland where she’s ready to chase the White Rabbit and you’re not sure if she’s dreaming or still awake when she falls down the rabbit hole. Alice screams in terror as she falls, but she begins to realize that the fall is so slow and ridiculously long that she cannot bear the fear. She soon begins to experience the event as a simple fall and wonders when she will land. The hours seem to pass and she spends her time looking at the walls as she descends. There are jam jars on the shelves, plates, teacups, and books. She sees them all, but she continues to fall, so she can’t figure out why they’re there.

When you discover that your spouse has been unfaithful, you never land. You travel through the hole believing that there are days that you have landed at the bottom of the well. Do you tell yourself that you feel so horrible, that surely it couldn’t get any worse than this? Surely, this must be the background? You want the bottom. You long for the bottom of the hole just to land somewhere. Just like Alice, if you land, you can find out where you are instead of wondering where you’re going. Once you land, can’t plan your return trip?

With infidelity there is no landing to start your journey back to what was. What you knew is gone. Imagine suddenly being homeless without a friend or destination in mind to help you out. You look for a place to sleep, to eat something, a place to shower, but it’s never enough to restore you. You’re never clean enough, you never get enough rest, and food doesn’t seem to quench the hunger within you. He wants more, but even after a few nights of being homeless, he can no longer remember what it feels like to live inside a house. Memories of safety can’t hold you because if everything was taken from you, how can you feel safe knowing that?

Death was in my dreams. I opened doors and there was no one. The glass broke but no one was there to hear it. I looked for my children, but I couldn’t find them. There was never anyone there in my dreams. He was alone, searching, and on the verge of a violent death. If she found someone, it was usually Elise, the other woman. I awoke from the dreams as if I had not slept and my body throbbed with pain. I faced the day but I couldn’t do anything. I would do what I must, but nothing more. I fed the children, did the housework, went to work, but each activity took me away from thoughts that I did not want to leave. My job was to deal with this deception, even if dealing with it amounted to absolutely nothing. It occupied my entire being and pushed everything out of my mind.

I wanted to kill her. he had met her. She had met my children. She had attended parties at my house. She had sympathized with her stories. I stood up for her when my husband complained about her job performance. He had moved 2,000 miles away, but I hung around her old home. Crying and wishing he could knock on her door just to touch her face. As she was driving, would she cross the street and I would hit her with my car? “Officer, I never saw her cross the street. She was crossing the street.” Surely, that’s why defenses against insanity were devised?

Drawers and more drawers full of papers, coins, matchboxes, old numbers began to acquire a new meaning. They were treasure troves of possible clues to the past that he had never known. My kids would ask me what I was doing and say I was cleaning. Yes, cleaning that was it. I was trying to clean up the past, make sense of it, and make sense of everything I had missed. I hadn’t really lived through those years. Oh, I thought I had, but you can’t when there’s such a big lie. I was scrambling under and over the walls of memory to fill those gaps with this information. The knowledge came as shards in the discarded junk drawer. In the midst of innocent conversations, I would ask my husband questions that just wouldn’t rest. “Did you drive down the highway with her? Did you ever eat together? Did she make you breakfast?” Relentless, meaningless questions, but the balance of my emotional state rested on the answer. If I could only put the pieces together, I could put myself together.

The answers came, but they were not enough. The holes and gaps of those years remained. In between discussions, we would sit and eat, watch TV, sleep together. We were passionate. We proclaim our love and our commitment. I was dying. The days turned into months and eventually we reached the point where we moved past the anger and disappointment. It went beyond the arguments. It was calm for my husband and he welcomed these days, hard-won after months of my tumult. Peace may seem calm, but it is also despair. Anger was life and it was a way of trying to take over my life and reshape it. Twist it, bend it, turn it back into something you knew and understood.

I didn’t know where things were for my husband and me. I thought I knew on most days. He was the repentant spouse who saved this marriage. I was the one who had reached the brink of sanity, but he was coming back. He could forgive, but he could not forget. That seemed absurd. How do you forget? Would anyone forget that he has cancer? Would they forget a car accident? My husband and I had lost touch over the years; something I now know, but could not understand without his confession. The rabbit hole seemed to have light at the end of the tunnel. I wasn’t going to land, but maybe I’d start walking out myself; exploring the contents of the tunnel along the way.