20-something, skinny clueless girl, who liked the fact that he drove a nice car and said all the right things. Moral compass? Slightly off skew, but not unexpected.

I immediately called Brendan out on it, and his first reaction wasn’t one of mortification or even slight remorse. He actually asked, “Did she contact you?”

Hmm.

Hmm.

Well that was an indicator, right? His general response was “Nothing happened, get over it.” 250 pages of emails told me otherwise. I told him to immediately end the relationship, which he did. And then given that we were married, we had one child and a second almost on the way, I immediately put us into couples counseling. I wasn’t honestly sure I knew what to do with this information. I wasn’t sure if I could forgive him. The only thing I knew was that the trust I had in him was broken. I didn’t know if it could be fixed.

We continued on with our lives as normally as we could. I had my second child, a girl, who was just a lovely bundle of deliciousness. As a family, we were all under the same roof, which established some type of normalcy; but the shards from our broken reality hovered like a thick fog. Brendan was semi-engaged, but his “get over it” stance still stood.

We struggled with counseling. Brendan really just couldn’t dig deep enough to get down to it, and I think he felt ganged up on because the therapist continually tried to expose the affair. Listen, it was no fucking picnic for me either. We had to open that wound if we were ever going to have a small chance of recovering from it. It was PAINFUL, but nothing was more painful than knowing the affair happened and having your husband tell you to just “get over it”.

After months of digging, Brendan told the therapist that he in fact did have an affair. I think he did it so she would stop asking. When the therapist asked me how that felt, I told both her and Brendan that it felt as if he was admitting his wrong just to appease her. She told us both, “ Obviously, there is work to do here. You both have to be willing to do the work if you ever hope to save this marriage.”

A week later, as I hung the final picture on the wall of our newly purchased house, Brendan asked for a divorce.