“Both of my girls were upstairs napping when I sat down to surf the internet. Messages started coming in from iMessage. The name didn’t look familiar, and it just seemed odd. I started reading the conversation between my husband and a name I didn’t recognize… He had a stranger over at my house where my kids sleep.”
‘My entire 10-year marriage was a lie. I never really knew the man I was sleeping next to. I married a stranger. ‘Now what? What do I do?’ Something in my gut told me I needed to dig deeper.’
‘I stayed in a destroyed marriage for a year, convinced we could make it through. It didn’t matter he was in love with another woman; I KNEW he would come to his senses.’
“I would hide in vain in my closet. ‘Get up!’ I would tell myself, ‘Get up!’ I wanted to get up; I didn’t want my son to find me like this- to see me like this. But he would and it started to become a regular occurrence.”
‘I found YEARS of mail in his trunk. My husband was living a double life and had another daughter! He abandoned us in a Target parking lot and changed the locks to our home.’
“He was a con-artist living a double life. All of our belongings were thrown out like trash. My daughter and I tried to make the best of our ‘vacation’ as I called it, while I cried and washed clothes in a hotel sink. I thought to myself, ‘How could I be so dumb?'”
‘Are you sleeping with my husband?’ My baby was 4 months old and she needed her daddy. She dropped a bombshell. They immediately updated their relationship status on Facebook.’
“I’d walk in from work to find them giggling in the kitchen. Just when I thought life couldn’t get any better, I found out I was pregnant. She grinned. ‘Anytime you want me to babysit, I’d be happy to.’ She looked me straight in the eye. ‘I thought you should know…’ she began.”
‘The text was simple: ‘Later 2nite.’ He was my husband. She was my great friend. All he could muster was, ‘At least I come home to the family.’
“He walked out of the bathroom, his shirt half tucked into his undone pants. He looked at his cell in my hand and raised an eyebrow. The trembling in my voice was out of control. ‘Are you having an affair?’ He laughed. ‘I thought you knew.'”
‘I called that hotel room and heard his voice. And then heard HER voice in the background. That was the day I broke. How do you live with someone not know who they truly are? Was I blind?’
“When I saw the credit card charges to a hotel in a town 1,000 miles from where he was supposed to be, that was when I felt the knife in my gut – but somehow I still thought, maybe it was a mistake. Did someone open a card under his name?”
‘Your husband has been unfaithful to you,’ I was informed. ‘This marriage was a mistake,’ I told my husband. Weeks later, I found out I was pregnant. My fairy tale turned into a nightmare.’
“I received the most devastating blow to what I thought was a ‘perfect’ marriage. I felt divorce was the only option. In tears, I called my mom. ‘Come home, Avrielle,’ she said.”
‘My phone rings. It’s a number I don’t recognize. A woman asks if she’s speaking to Stefany. She tells me she’s been having an affair with my husband for 18 months.’
“On the rare instance I want to go back, the guards politely remind me I don’t belong there anymore and to go back home.”
