This wasn’t the way it was supposed to be. I did everything I could to make sure my marriage would succeed. Hell, I had even lost my best friend to make sure my feelings for her didn’t get in the way. And what did he do? He fucking cheated on me. It was just a few times he said. It was over he said. He still loved me. He begged for my forgiveness.
I’m not sure he ever would have told me about it had I not found the charges on the credit card statement. Awfully stupid of him not to use cash to pay for hotel rooms and to buy his mistress gifts.
He agreed to counseling with the pastor of our church. I was in the process of forgiving him. It was taking some time. I let him back into the bedroom but found myself sleeping on the edge of the bed in an effort to stay away from him. I still couldn’t let him touch me. Not the way he had touched her.
People make mistakes. I told myself that again and again. I didn’t want my marriage to fail. If I could just forgive him, we could get past this. But it wasn’t that simple. Forgiveness didn’t get back the trust. Didn’t get back what we lost. No, not what we lost—what he threw away. What he tore apart, waded into a ball, and stomped on. No getting back to where we were—or maybe we were never really there. I just didn’t know anymore.
To the rest of the world, nothing had changed. I went to work, bought groceries from Wegmans, and went to family functions. No one knew. No one except my mother.
“Men will be men,” she said to me. “It’s what they do.”
That wasn’t good enough for me. “Forsaking all others,” he had said in church, in front of me, in front of a hundred and fifty people. In front of God. But he hadn’t forsaken her. He had fucked her.