The Worst Time.

"Is this the worst part?" I asked a friend. My husband was gone. This girlfriend has been with me through the preceding years of addiction. She said that the worst part was when I'd kicked him out, finally, after months of promising him I would if he didn't quit using. That part was hard, but my friend was wrong. It was not the worst part. The time when he was gone with the other woman was, definitively, the worst part.

Two years ago tonight, he went on his first date with the other woman. It was her birthday. Her fiance was in another country, and she'd met my husband, fancied him, and asked him to accompany her on her birthday. I found out all this because he'd left his email account open, and I'd read their correspondence.

He asked her what she planned to wear. She replied that she'd wear a cream dress.

I confronted him, and he said I was crazy. It was nothing. She was a nice girl and she was lonely. She needed friends. She might want a tattoo, so it was for business.

Oh, but I knew. I recognized his tone. I'd seen it before, having been the object of his desire. I knew what was coming.

He didn't come home that night. For the next month, he spent about half his time at home with me, sometimes affectionate and sometimes cold or angry or scary, and he spent the rest of his time with her. Every time I confronted him, he denied he was with her, but I knew it. Finally, the evidence was incontrovertible, and once there was nothing left to lie about, he stopped seeing her. Just like that.

That month is so vivid to me, still. I went about my business, and I mostly pulled it off. No one at any of the several jobs I held down at the time had any idea what was happening at home. I'd come home, though, and fall apart. I couldn't eat. I had a hard time seeing anyone. I spent my time in bed, waiting. I planned what I'd say to him whenever he came back home.

Please, will you hold me? That's what I planned to say. And that's what I said, too, when he came home from the longest stretch of days he'd spent with her. He sad down on the stairs of our home and put his arms around me. I lay my head on his chest and listened to the beating of his heart. There was nothing to say.

I don't want to know her birthday. I wish it washed from my memory. It's too close to Cinco de Mayo, though. It's too easy to remember.

Later, I saw pictures she'd posted of the evening. He'd dressed up for their date. He had a sweater he'd bought one day about a month prior when he'd made some money doing an odd job. That same day, he brought home a new pair of shoes for me. That night, we'd made love. He'd told me how perfect I was, how supportive, how wonderful, how he'd never forget. It all came unglued so easily.

And that's what's so scary, I think. I was doing the best I could, being the best wife, the best lover, doing everything right...and it wasn't enough. There was no warning, no action on my part, nothing I could do to keep my heart safe. The girl was unremarkable and, apparently, easy enough to forget, at least for him. There is no predicting when it could happen again, and there seems, at least so far, to be no hope of complete healing.

Tonight, two years later, my husband is clean. I have learned through the years not to count his clean time, but I think he's somewhere around 100 days. He's working some, and he's giving a fair share of the money he makes to me. I'm pregnant, and we're having a happy time. But tonight, it hurts still.

I feel our baby moving, and I want to tell her that I'm so, so sorry that everything could come undone. I want to promise her that I will protect her from that kind of pain, that I will be strong, and that it won't happen again. I can't, though, and for that, I am so, so sorry.