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[hardrowcrossedpalm]

I let myself be played for a fool for 18 years. This is how it happened. A decade before I got married, I realized my life choices were being dictated by extreme trauma in my childhood, and I sought therapy. I stayed single and worked hard on truly knowing myself and what I wanted. I had kissed a lot of frogs in my past, and I thought that after intense treatment and hard experience I could see through anyone's bull.

Then I met my husband. Let's call him Andy. He was far and away an improvement on the men I'd been meeting, but NOT too good to be true. He was open about his flaws. He's 4 months older than me, from the same general area but far enough away that our high school sports teams never played against each other. It seemed like we had an instant connection. We dated for 3 1/2 really wonderful years before we got married. His proposal was like something out of a Hallmark movie, there were literal fireworks (professional ones!). We had a beautiful wedding, an absolutely magical honeymoon in Hawaii, we bought a 3 bedroom mid-century ranch on a 1/2 acre lot in an established neighborhood, with 24-hour, fully licensed and accredited day care and one of the best elementary schools in town within walking distance. We had 14 months of newlywedded bliss.

Then came doubts that were harder and harder to dismiss. We were working opposite shifts, and things felt... off. He'd always had mostly female friends, but my gut was telling me something wasn't on the level. The night before our first big dinner party with his family and my family together in our new house, I decided to get peace of mind by taking a look at his email. We both knew each other's passwords, it wasn't really any kind of breach. I thought if I could just gauge the way he talked to his friends, I could understand him better. I logged in, and there was nothing in his inbox, nothing in trash, everything was deleted. Except for his sent folder. He forgot to delete the most recent one.

It started out with "Cindy, I fantasize about you coming to my house wearing nothing but a flannel shirt". It went on in very explicit detail about what he'd do with her and to her, in specific locations of MY house. I hadn't expected to see that, and I was beyond devastated. I had never even heard of "Cindy", but it was clear they had an established relationship. It broke me. I thought I'd been so careful to pick someone honest. I was in free fall. I didn't remember standing up from the office chair, but I found myself backing away from the computer like it was a venomous snake. I made it to the doorway of the office and collapsed. I have no idea how long I lay there weeping. I wasn't in the world. I was lost. At some point, I came back to myself, I sat up, and decided I needed to make a plan. I felt so ashamed that I'd been fooled, I couldn't bear the thought of getting divorced so soon. I didn't have anywhere to go. To say that my stepdad and I didn't get along was the understatement of the century. He was a disgusting animal. My mother believed my grandmother's vile, abusive rhetoric, so she stayed with him because she thought that's what she deserved. My mother would have gladly welcomed me back home, we were very close, but I couldn't live with him, and I couldn't bring myself to make life harder for her by fighting with him. My only living grandparents were my abuser and her enabler. I had no other family. With one year down on a thirty year mortgage, I knew I couldn't afford the house on my own. I didn't feel like there was a move to be made. I decided death was the only way out. I was giving the bathroom a quick once over because I didn't want to be found surrounded by dingy tile when I was struck with a vision. A real, sent-by-God epiphany. My mother's only sister had suffered a stroke about 3 months before I got married. She was in the hospital for a full year. My mom went to visit her one Sunday, and my aunt was really excited about something. The stroke had affected her speech, and because she was trying to express herself so exuberantly, my mom couldn't understand her. My aunt chattered joyfully until she got sleepy, then my mom went home. An hour later, the hospital called my mom to say my aunt had quietly passed away. In my vision, I suddenly understood that if I died now, just a few months after my aunt, it would be too much for my mom to bear. I felt it was revealed to me that what my aunt was so eagerly trying to tell my mom was that she was being released from a life of agony, and her death would save my life. It did. I snapped back to reality, and realized my suicide would have destroyed my mother. But I swerved too far in the other direction. I still couldn't cope with what I read, so I put it out of my mind. We had our big dinner party, and I carried on like nothing happened.

Three days after the party, I worked up the strength to confront my husband about the email. He was unflappable, completely not bothered. He calmly explained that it was all just a silly joke. "Cindy" was a friend from high school, and everyone from his small town had the same sense of humor, they just get carried away with jokes sometimes. It sounds utterly ridiculous to my ears now, but he spoke so matter of factly, and I was so desperate to believe my husband loved me that I wholeheartedly swallowed his excuse.

Years passed in a haze of new homeownership, financial ups and downs, and career changes. I pinned my hopes on a baby, we had planned our whole married lives around preparing for kids. But a baby never came. Then my mom got cancer. She told me about her diagnosis in December. She died in September of the following year. I was bereft. I didn't know how to be in the world without her, but I was raised to keep up appearances, so I soldiered on. My stepdad ran amok. He was always a slovenly pig, and without my mom, he was free to wallow in his own filth. Various neighborhood skanks traipsing in and out of my childhood home, my mother's little gingerbread cottage. One day, about a year after my mother was gone, I discovered the front door of her house standing open, and the inside completely ransacked and vandalized. All of my childhood belongings were lost or destroyed. He hadn't paid the mortgage and the bank was going to take the house, so he just walked away. Our shame was posted in my hometown newspaper, back taxes and foreclosure. Because my mother died without a will, my stepdad was considered the only heir, as her spouse. He never adopted me, so to probate court, I was no one. The house sat empty for a while until it was condemned and torn down. There's a weedy, overgrown lot with no street number where my home used to be.

Not long after, my employer of nearly a decade decided to "streamline" the company and I was unceremoniously "released". Now I was sinking in an ocean with no bottom. I clung to my husband and he assured me it was us against the world. Still no baby. I struggled with depression and ineffective treatment for a couple of rough years. When I found a new job and finally started to wake up to the world again, I realized I was feeling that same old something's-not-right feeling. I thought, it can't be, IT. CAN'T. BE. Not after all I've been through. On an afternoon in the summertime, we went for a drive in my husband's little sports car, then stopped to pick up a pizza on the way home. I stayed in the car while he ducked into the tiny shop. As I waited, I noticed a thumb drive sitting in his cup holder. As I looked at it, I swear it was glowing, highlighted like a bonus object in a video game. I picked it up just as my husband opened the car door and blindly handed me the pizza box. The ten minute drive home felt like an eternity, trying to stay focused on my husband's small talk while my brain was screaming THIS CAN'T BE A THING. IT'S PROBABLY BLANK OR SOMETHING FROM HIS WORK. YOU'RE SO FREAKING PARANOID, WHAT'S WRONG WITH YOU??? I waited until the next morning, after my husband went to work, then plugged in the drive, and there was "Cindy" in her fully naked glory. Since the email incident, I had poked around and found out that "Cindy" was Andy's high school dreamgirl. She mostly strung him along, but they did go on a few dates. Apparently her marriage wasn't going the way she'd hoped, so she reconnected with her simp.

I told him that evening that we needed to get into couples counseling ASAP, but I didn't mention the picture. We had a tense couple of weeks while we waited to get in to see someone, but he never asked why I felt it was so important. In the getting-to-know-you first session, he acted like "gee willikers, I don't really know why we're here, I just do what my wife says", and even though I had a copy of the picture in my purse, I couldn't bring myself to show it to the counselor. Right after we got home, I brought out the picture and asked him to explain. He started crying, saying it was a mistake, and nothing else happened, then he blamed my depression. I couldn't comprehend that, I was too astounded to even reply.

Therapy was an utter failure, we had the worst counselor in history. After two months of zero progress, we fired her, and decided we could make our own way. He convinced me I was who he wanted, and we would make it work. I know it sounds implausible that I would believe him. I think I needed to because I couldn't face being alone in the world.

Skip many years into the future. We gave up hope for a baby and accepted our lives as a child-free couple. We traveled, we aged, we carved out a comfortable existence. Through a quirk of modern technology, I intercepted an odd message from "Cindy", who was supposed to be banished from our lives. She and her husband finally split, her divorce was just finalized, and she was coming to town. In the following messages, Cindy and Andy made plans to hook up in a Super 8 motel instead of coming to my home while I was at work, because "she just couldn't get comfortable at the house". I moved out. But guess what folks? I couldn't tolerate the idea of losing the house I worked so hard for. The thought of another woman sitting in front of my fireplace was more than I could take. I'd already lost so much, when I wasn't the cheater. It just felt too unfair. So I came back. Only I discovered all my trust was gone. I'm not even interested in trying to believe anything he says. I just want my home, my only home in the world.