People assume the affair was the wound. It wasn't. I could tell you the story of the affair in four minutes and I've mostly stopped bleeding from it.
What I couldn't get past was the drip.
First it was a friendship. Then it was one kiss, and she was so sorry. Then a week later it was more than one kiss. Then it was two months, not two weeks. Then it was on the trip I paid for. Every disclosure arrived only after I'd found something, and every one came with the same face — the same real tears — that had come with the last one.
So I wasn't grieving once. I was grieving eleven times, and each time she got to be the one comforting me about the thing she'd chosen not to tell me the previous Thursday.
And the other part, the part I still can't fully put down: for months before I had proof, she told me I was insecure. Not cruelly. Gently. Worriedly. She suggested I talk to someone about my anxiety. I went. I sat in an office and worked on my trust issues while she went to lunch with him.
That's what broke it. Not the sex. The fact that she used my own trust in her as a tool to keep me quiet.
I forgave her, in the sense that I no longer want anything bad to happen to her. That's real and it took two years. But forgiveness turned out to be a different account than trust, and only one of them ever got funded again.
The stories currently featured in this collection are fictional accounts created to explore common relationship patterns, decisions, and consequences. They are not presented as accounts from identifiable individuals. As real reader stories are submitted with permission, they'll be clearly identified. These fictional accounts are illustrative, not clinical guidance. They are not therapy, legal advice or a substitute for professional help.