Journal Entry:  Saturday, January 11, 2014 (Discovery Day aka dday).

My cell phone rang, and rang, and rang. No Caller ID. He said don’t answer it. Sometimes he gets calls like that too. Who knows, maybe a solicitation. He goes downstairs {ostensibly} to let the dogs out. Something inside my head tells me to answer No Caller ID on the 5^th try, not the 5th ring, I answer on her 5th time calling and letting it ring until it goes to voice mail, but she doesn’t leave a message, just redials.

She talks like she knows me, she says my name and her name and she says, “I have been having an affair with your husband for about 10 years. We have traveled together…” she mentions places, she knows both our office locations, she says my son’s name. I hang up on her. No one claiming to have had an affair with my husband gets to mention my children’s names. No. My head is reeling. I am so confused. I think who is this lady, she sounds like an old smoker? She is older and although he denies it, I know she is a smoker. Not a huge deal to some, but I know he doesn’t like the smell of cigarette smoke. He abhors it. His Mother smoked for years. It’s a negative memory. Sure he understands a lot of people smoke, but to take on a lover that smokes??? He is not having an affair with a smoker? Of everything I could be thinking, this is not rational. This is when I shut down. Me, the me I know and love, the me that is happy, safe and secure, gone. The me that my husband fell in love with 30 years ago, and still loves, she vanishes. I have left the room and in my place, in my head, is someone I do not recognize. The trauma is so immediate. Although a piece of me wanted to believe someone was stalking my sweet, successful husband, obsessed with the THOUGHT of having an affair with him, surely she was not telling the truth. Surely my husband did not have a mistress. But, I knew she was telling the truth.

I called him upstairs. I numbly relayed the brief call. At first, he does deny it. He says she is from a previous online indiscretion and nothing ever happened, she is crazy, a stalker, delusional, she must have looked all these details up on the Internet. I knew he was full of fucking bullshit. I could see it in his pathetic eyes, I could hear it in his broken and defeated voice. He sat very still for quite some time and then he said… “I have been having an affair with this woman for many years. I don’t love her, it was just sex. She went with me on business trips because I was lonely. I would go to her house for sex maybe once or twice a week for a couple or three weeks, and then I would call it off for months. I would tell her I loved my wife. Tell her I didn’t want to do this anymore.” He said the relationship made him feel sick. He said he spent a long time thinking about their hook ups, planning them, then immediately felt horrible shame and guilt once they were over. That is what he said.

I was so numb, I could not possibly grasp everything that I was hearing, absorb it, and internalize it without going completely insane. I listened. I asked a few quiet questions, like “is this No Caller ID the same woman, the Craig’s list woman?” I asked if No Caller ID was the only one, or if there were others. I sensed that I knew there were others and I knew exactly who they were. His responses were slow and painful, painful to both of us. I was experiencing a level of shock and horror I didn’t think possible. Auto responses kicked in. While we were talking, my mobile phone continued to vibrate in my lap, over and over and over. No Caller ID left a message reiterating everything she had previously said and letting me know that if I wanted to discuss things further, my husband had ALL her numbers. As the day wore on, the numbness grew. The only feelings I was aware of were shock, sadness, and fear. When my husband would leave the room, I would have this uncontrollable fear that he was leaving forever. The feeling I thought would be at the forefront, anger, was not there. The realization that my life was not at all what I thought it was, was debilitating. Shock took over.