It’s weird how life does that, how it circles back on itself at exactly the time when you feel like you’ve finally moved past it. You spend all this time trying to put the past behind you, and then, out of the blue, something or someone appears, forcing you to confront it all once again. For me, it happened at three in the morning. I was half asleep, reaching over to grab my phone to shut off whatever alarm or notification had gone off, when I saw the name on the screen.
It was Stacey.
You see, Stacey was once my best friend, and she’s now my ex-husband’s wife. When I actually picked up, her voice was a mess, shaking and thin. I didn’t expect to hear fear in her voice, and I certainly didn’t expect to hear the regret.
But then something happened that I could have never seen coming. It was this strange connection between two women who had been tied to this man in completely different ways. We had both been hurt and lied to by him, but instead of remaining bitter enemies, we had become unlikely allies in finding the truth we’d been blind to all these years.
It wasn’t even really about revenge or being bitter. It was just… clarity. We had found something in each other that I didn’t even think was possible.
For seven years, I really believed that Alan and I had a good thing going. And why wouldn’t I? He and I had a nice home, two lovely girls, Mia and Sophie, and a future ahead of us. Honestly, it did seem like a good marriage, maybe not a picture-perfect one, but definitely a solid one. Alan was a great with the girls, and he had this charm that just made people want to like him. I felt like I had a guy who really liked being around me and my girls.
But then things began to change. And those were slight changes at first, it’s not like it was a big blow out of the blue but more like a slow slide. He started coming home late, and he’d give me these vague excuses about his work. The business trips started getting more and more frequent, and it got harder and harder to pin him down. He and I no longer talked about everything like before, and I could sense something was going on. What I found the strangest of all was his phone that used to be just right there, on the middle of the table, but was now faced down and always locked. Call it intuition or being aware, but things were different, I could definitely see it.
As you assume already, bringing any of this up ended with Alan branding me paranoid. Was I imagining things? Of course I wasn’t.
When I think about it, I believe that I lived in denial more than I should’ve. I continued to tell myself that there had to be another explanation or that we were just having a rough period. Yet, the truth would finally come out, and it would turn out that he was with another woman, named Kara. When I finally confronted him about it, he did not even bother to try to defend himself. Instead, he just shut up, grabbed his bag, and left. And just like that, my marriage ended.
Just like with any divorce out there, mine was also a rollercoaster. Messy? I guess so. What I found it the hardest of all was that now I had two girls that depended on me, so I didn’t have the luxury of falling apart, even though I felt like every minute of every day.
I picked up extra hours at work, went to therapy, and just focused on getting through it for my daughters. And then enough time had passed that let me believe that my failed marriage was already a closed book.
Unlike me, Alan moved on and remarried, and it was something I couldn’t wrap my mind around. That, by itself, would have been hard enough, but it turned out that Alan had married Stacey, my best friend. The person who I had confided in about my marriage, who had listened to me speak about all the pain that Alan had put me through, who had been with me throughout the divorce. Or at least, that’s what I had thought. When Stacey called me to tell me the news, I felt like the ground had been swept out from under me. I asked her how she could marry the man who had destroyed my family, who had put me through all the pain that Alan had, and still expect me to be her friend. She had no answer. That, to me, was answer enough. I hung up the phone, shut both of them out of my life, and focused on my girls. I thought I had shut the door on them forever.
Well, a year had passed and I moved on too, because there wasn’t really anything else that I could do. And then, out of thin air, I got a call in the middle of the night. It was Stacey. I didn’t want to answer the call,but I did it anyways.
She told me that she did not feel safe, and that she had ignored the red flags for too long. She asked if she could come over, and even though every part of me wanted to say no, I told her yes because, unlike the other times, her voice told me she was scared.
An hour later and there she was at my door. Alan was out of town, and she had gone through his home office, a place he always locked. What she saw there wasn’t very nice. He had all of this material from all of these different women, organized and locked away like he was keeping trophies. While it wasn’t illegal, it was very weird. He had dates and information that indicated he went from one woman to another, never really committing to any of us, not even me, and not even this other woman.
Why wasn’t I surprised that her story was a carbon copy of mine? Just like me, she failed to see the red flags, but the difference was that no one warmed me about my ex, and Stacey had me to hear from all about the type of man Alan was, and yet, she went on and married him.
I did remind her of that, many times during that evening, and she kept saying, “I thought you were exaggerating.” So, was I? Of course not.
The most interesting part was that I wasn’t mad at Stacey for marrying Alan any longer. Because of some reason, I somehow felt sorry for her.
At that point, I realized that it wasn’t just Stacey’s life and future at stake, but also my daughters’. If Alan was that kind of man, then I need to know the whole story. So, we looked at everything she had found, remained calm, and even contacted a few of the other women. They had the same story. They had found him to be charming, easy to talk to, but couldn’t maintain an emotional stability, and that wasn’t much of a secret, really.
And by the time morning rolled around, we both felt something we hadn’t felt in years: clarity.
Needles to say, Stacey decided to walk away from Alan. And she did not make her choice impulsively but with a plan and support. And when she did, Alan reacted in exactly the way you’d expect. He was confused, but not really affected. For me, having the entire picture gave me the confidence that I’d been lacking. I fixed the custody arrangements and defined my boundaries. I wasn’t guessing anymore; I finally knew what I was truly dealing with.
Months later, Stacey and I sat together once again, in the same room where she had first arrived, consumed with fear. Everything had changed. I looked at her and told her that we had made it through, and she thanked me for being there for her when I did not have to. For so long, the only thing that had ever really connected us had been anger, but now that had gone away. We were not two women, bound together by the act of betrayal, anymore. We were two people who had looked at the truth, had looked at the reality, and had made it through it, stronger for it.
I looked at her and told her that we deserved better, and she just nodded. For the first time in years, I did not feel closure, or relief. I just felt free.
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