I let my wife apologize to the woman I was sleeping with, and I watched her do it without telling her the truth. There had been a misunderstanding at a work function, and my wife thought she’d been rude to this woman. She worried about it for two days before writing her a handwritten note to apologize. I read the note before she sent it and told her it was a nice gesture. What I didn’t tell her was that the woman had been in my bed, and my wife was apologizing to the person I was betraying her with. I watched her put that note in the envelope and convinced myself that keeping quiet was somehow protecting her.
That was 2018, and the affair continued for another year. The woman kept my wife’s note because, according to her later, it was the kindest thing anyone had ever done for her during that period. My wife never suspected anything and occasionally mentioned how relieved she was that the misunderstanding had been cleared up. I would nod and change the subject. She had no idea that the woman she thought she had accidentally offended was the woman I was choosing over her. I had taken my wife’s kindness and turned it into another piece of cover for my own dishonesty.
The woman’s marriage eventually ended, and in November her husband found my wife’s note while going through her things after she moved out. He read it, looked at the dates, and apparently started doing the arithmetic. The note was dated during the period when the affair had been happening, and something about the timing made everything click for him. He found my name in her phone and drove to my house on a Sunday morning. When I opened the door, he was holding the note my wife had written, and he asked me why my wife had been apologizing to his wife. I knew immediately that there was no explanation I could give that wouldn’t make everything worse.
He asked whether my wife knew about us, and I said no. He looked at me for a long time and then asked whether I’d ever told my wife that she’d been apologizing to the woman I was sleeping with. I couldn’t answer. He handed the note back to me and said, “She was trying to be kind to your wife, and you let her use that kindness as camouflage.” I stood there holding the same piece of paper I’d once called a nice gesture. That was the first time I understood that the worst part of the affair wasn’t that I’d lied to my wife—it was that I’d taken something genuinely good about her and used it to make my betrayal easier.
