Death by a Thousand Cuts

This is part eight of my story of recovering from my wife’s affair and rebuilding our marriage. If you haven’t already, please start at the beginning with part one.

Somewhere in my top ten list of the worst things she’s done to me during this whole ordeal is that she revealed the truth to me piecemeal. One hurtful revelation at a time, and many of those truths told only when cornered. It’s the difference between suffering one quick, painful injury, and suffering the same injury but then being slowly tortured.

We sat in our bedroom on that Sunday afternoon and talked as I processed new truths yet again. She insisted repeatedly that now I finally knew everything. There was nothing — nothing! — more she could tell me. I pressed her: “Please, if there’s anything else tell me now. It would actually help to hear you reveal something else to me when you don’t have to.”

“I wish I still had something left to tell you,” she insisted through tears.

“Nothing? Nothing at all I don’t already know? You can tell me anything right now and we’ll work through it. We’ll figure it out.”

She scrunched her face in concentration. “The morning after, in the hotel, I was taking a shower, and he knocked on the door, and asked to come get in the shower with me. I told him no.”

This wasn’t a confession, of course. It actually made her look better than before! But if that was all she had left to tell me, I accepted it as truth. I thought she really had finally revealed everything to me.

I know, I know. If you’re reading this, you’re thinking… “WHAT?! Dude, come ON!!!”

You have to remember, I had known and loved this woman for over twenty-five years. In the course of our entire marriage I had caught her in probably fewer than half a dozen lies. Little, relatively harmless fibs about minor things, like how much she had spent shopping. She had never shown me a propensity for dishonesty. After finding out about the affair, of course I knew she had been lying to me constantly for a while. Then, over the next three and a half weeks, I had caught her in a few more minor lies, and now, two new whoppers: the dinner cover story and her claim that she hadn’t heard from him at all were both lies that she had insisted were true, dozens of times each.

Still, I believed her to be an honest person at her core. And I still believe that. If I’m judging her honesty, how can I give her behavior over a couple of months more weight than the preceding quarter of a century? She is essentially the same person she has been over the course of our relationship. She has just been making terribly selfish and extremely hurtful decisions recently.

So, as we went to bed Sunday night, for some reason, I thought I finally knew everything. I was wrong.

I woke up around 2:30 a.m. Monday morning with another bolt-from-the-blue moment of clarity. If she could receive a message from him over LinkedIn — over a website, basically — then she could have communicated with him over another website, or even over an email account that I was unaware of.

In the times I had checked her phone over the past three and a half weeks, I’d only checked apps. I’d never checked her browser history. I’m a pretty tech-savvy guy. I can’t believe it hadn’t occurred to me.

I went and got her phone, and lay back down in bed next to her as she slept. I first pulled up her Google search history. Near the top of the list: “How to delete browser history Safari.” Uh-oh. Not a good sign.

Unfortunately, I guess she hadn’t figured out how to do it yet. I went to Safari and began to scroll down through the history of the preceding weeks. I soon saw an entry linking to a Gmail account with “scarletletter” in the user name. For a moment, I thought “Maybe she used this email address to join a support group for adulterers?” I clicked the link. The account had been deleted.

I looked through her browser history further, and saw dozens upon dozens of visits to this Gmail account, multiple times a day. It wasn’t for a support group.

In clicking one of these links, I saw that the account had been associated with another Gmail account she had. I used the saved passwords on her phone to access that account. In her Inbox, there was nothing out of the ordinary. Just emails pertaining to our kids’ school and some shopping promos. Nothing interesting in the Trash, either. I went to the Drafts folder. There was one saved draft. Her affair partner’s personal email address was in the recipient field.

She must have typed this draft in her main Gmail account, realized the foolishness of communicating through that account, and instead set up the new “scarletletter” address. But she neglected to delete the draft from her existing account, so it was here for me to read:

“Hi. So, things have been a little intense at my house since Thursday morning. Just want to let you know that I miss you and my plan is still the same.”

I bolted out of bed, started yelling her name. “Get up! Get up now!” I turned on the light. She sat up groggily.

“You’ve been talking to him. You’ve been talking to him the whole time! You never stopped!”

She closed her eyes, said nothing.

“Say something!” I yelled.

I had woken her from a dead sleep by screaming at her. It took her a minute to start responding. But when she did, she didn’t deny anything. It was true.

My finding out about the affair had been little more than a speed bump for her. She had kept it going. After seeing the immense pain she had caused me. After seeing my response: not anger or fear, but understanding, love, enough courage to stick with it, and a renewed desire to make our marriage the best it could be. After I told her repeatedly that finding out she was still talking to him would utterly destroy me, and end our marriage.

“My plan is still the same,” she had told him.

This felt unforgivable. This felt like the end.

Part nine.