Total pages in book: 154
Estimated words: 142664 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 713(@200wpm)___ 571(@250wpm)___ 476(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 142664 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 713(@200wpm)___ 571(@250wpm)___ 476(@300wpm)
She was about twelve then, which meant it had been four years since my own personal hell began. I didn’t even realize so much time had gone by, and the guilt was enough to send me into another downward spiral, but this time, I pulled myself together because of the sadness in my little girl’s eyes.
Now, Alyssa was always a Daddy’s girl, but the first time I heard her call Corbin Dad instead of Daddy was the day I tapped into just how hard this whole thing was on her. She’d also gone and grown up without me noticing, and I realized how selfish I had been.
I called all my boys and apologized to them; we had a family meeting when Alyssa was out of the house because I had to ask them about the last four years of her life that I had missed. My sons didn’t berate me, for which I am eternally grateful, but they didn’t sugarcoat how hard it was on them and their sister either.
They were still hurt, still pissed, and they absolutely detested their father’s new wife. They blamed her for the affair and the divorce, and it was then I realized that they, too, were victims of the same fairytale bullshit that I had been.
It took a while and lots of self-reflection on my part, but eventually, I was brave enough to tell them the truth that it wasn’t just Helen or their Dad that I, too, had a hand in the demise of my marriage.
I decided then and there that I didn’t want my babies falling victim to the same shit I had, so I was open and honest with all of them. I didn’t hold back anything but was open and blunt to the point that there were no hidden meanings behind anything.
It became an almost weekly thing, but I was still not involving Alyssa in these talks, not yet. Me and the boys would video chat, and it became a kind of therapy for us and a way for all of us to heal together, I guess.
At this point, I had stopped talking to Corbin at all; it was just too hard. I hadn’t heard his voice for about three years and made sure the nanny or housekeeper was always the one to answer the door when he came to pick up Alyssa for their weekends together once the boys were gone.
But now, she was twelve, and there was no more nanny, and with everyone else gone, the housekeeper only came three days a week, which was plenty. I remember the first time I saw him, I was hyper-vigilant.
I wanted to assess my feelings to see if anything was still there. I was shocked to find that I was still in love with him and that most of the anger and hatred I’d been carrying around had dulled somewhat. I won’t say that I was too pleased with this realization.
I didn’t say anything, of course, but it was obvious that he was shocked to see me after all this time. I greeted him politely and said goodbye without asking about him or his life because I really didn’t care to know.
For some reason, that first meeting seemed to open the floodgates, and we started talking more and more. That’s when he told me that he never stopped loving me and that he and his wife were not intimate, which pissed me off because he fucked her while we were married, and now he was too guilty to have sex with her because of guilt.
We started going to therapy together behind everyone’s back; that was my idea. I needed to know if he was being honest with me, and we needed to know where we went wrong. We were never intimate because he was a married man, and I was not about to become my husband’s mistress.
When he told me back then that we were going to be together again one day, I believed him. But I’m a devious bitch. I wanted to make her suffer while I was working on myself. You’d have to live in my head to understand my mindset.
I knew I had a lot of work to do on myself, and I wasn’t about to rush shit just to end up back at the same place. Besides, there were kids involved, mine and hers. My kids hate her daughter, but as an adult, I saw her as a child whose mother had turned her life upside down as well.
The first thing Corbin and I did was get him on these pills that lower libido in men. I wanted to make sure that he never slept with that bitch ever again. Now see, my thinking was that I had gone without sex for the last eight years of my marriage because of my own trauma from childbirth, and she’d fucked my husband behind my back.