Dates.
Names.
Women’s names.
Beside each one were notes written with strange precision. Almost clinical.
At first, I didn’t understand what I was looking at.
Then I saw my husband’s name repeated again and again beside the entries.
My stomach turned.
It was a log.
Every affair.
Every date.
Every woman.
The entries went back years.
Years before I had gotten sick.
Years before our marriage began to collapse.
There were notes beside some names.
“Met at office party.”
“Neighbor’s friend.”
“Weekend trip — wife unaware.”
My hands were shaking as I turned the pages.
Then I reached the final entry.
It wasn’t a table.
It was a paragraph.
Her handwriting was slightly uneven, as if written by someone very tired.
She wrote:
“I know she will hate me forever. That is the price I chose to pay.”
My breath caught.
“She believes I destroyed her marriage. In truth, I saved her from it.”
The words blurred as I kept reading.
She wrote that her son had been cheating on me for years.
Not impulsively.
Not occasionally.
Systematically.
Obsessively.
He told her everything.
He bragged about it.
