I never thought a receipt for a pair of Italian dress shoes would be the thing that tore my family apart. But there I was, holding it, my heart pounding as I read the total. It was from a men’s store, dated two weeks earlier, and Victoria hadn’t mentioned buying a gift for anyone. Her dad was gone, she had no brothers, and I hadn’t received any shoes.
I knew I should have investigated, but cheating wasn’t the first thing on my mind. I’d been married for 15 years, and I believed in communication. So I asked her straight out. She read the receipt, and for a split second, her eyes widened.
Then she recovered quickly. She said she’d loaned a friend money to buy a gift for her husband because the friend’s card was declining. I asked if she’d been paid back. She said yes.
I wanted to ask for her bank statement, but I didn’t want to seem distrustful. I took her word for it, but something felt off. She was the kind of woman who talked about everything, and spending over a thousand dollars unplanned wasn’t like her. I knew the friend and her husband.
I watched football with him every couple of months. So the next weekend, I went over under the guise of watching the game. I let things go on for a while, then said, “I never took you as an Italian shoe guy. ” He looked confused.
He asked what I meant. I told him Victoria had helped his wife pick out shoes for him. He still looked confused. He asked if I might be spoiling a surprise, but I said no, since it had been over two weeks and the shoes were supposedly for an anniversary.
He shook his head. Their anniversary wasn’t anytime soon, and neither was his birthday. He rarely had occasions to wear fancy dress shoes. I had to stop him from suspecting anything, so I pretended I’d mistaken him for someone else.
I knew something was very wrong. I decided to hire a private investigator. I couldn’t afford constant surveillance, so I had her followed on weekends, when she always had something to do outside the house. It turned out to be a good investment.
That first weekend, she went straight to a man’s house from our place. The PI caught her on photo, watched him walk her back to her car, and saw her come home. She was there for four hours. He advised me to record her when she got back to get proof of where she claimed she was.
I did. She said she’d hung out with two female friends, gone to the mall, stopped at a restaurant, and chatted. I got that on video, time-stamped. On Monday, I learned where she’d actually been.
I was infuriated. Finding out that someone you never thought would cheat on you is truly cheating on you is not something you can understand unless it happens to you. It broke my heart. We had three children, been married for 15 years, together even longer.
None of that mattered in the end. I’d been good to her, so I knew I didn’t deserve this. I spoke to a divorce lawyer immediately, then went straight to confront her. I asked if she was cheating.
She looked affronted and asked why I was asking such a silly question out of nowhere. I asked where she’d been during the weekend. I could see her countenance shift. She repeated the story about her friends.
I asked her to confirm that was what she’d done. She was wary, but she said yes. Then I mentioned the street the man’s house was on and asked if she was familiar with it. Suddenly, she wasn’t so talkative.
I told her to consider telling the truth. She had no idea how much I knew, and if she chose to lie, I was going to get very angry. She spent a long time thinking. That was an admission of guilt in itself.
Eventually, she said she’d been seeing someone. The casualness of it pissed me off. I raised my voice. The kids were home, and the oldest is 13.
I didn’t want them to worry, but my anger got the better of me. I asked why. She couldn’t say anything. I asked again.
She admitted she didn’t have a good answer. It seemed exciting, and she got into it without properly considering our marriage. She regretted it at many points, but she felt like she’d already committed to it, so she didn’t see that getting out of it would suddenly absolve her. I told her it was never about absolution.
Her choosing to stop when she realized what she was doing was horrible would have been about her being morally outstanding. Instead, she was using the logic that because she’d already killed someone, she could continue to do it. It didn’t make sense. We went back and forth.
She wasn’t as defensive as she could have been. She was trying to get me to see her perspective, but there was nothing for me to see. I wouldn’t have cheated on her. I let her know it was going to end in divorce.
And when her kids wanted to know why things had crashed and burned, she would have to blame herself. She didn’t fight. She just said she understood. But that was where her maturity ended.
My oldest child, my daughter, came up to me as soon as I got home from work that day. She said she had to speak to me before I went into the house. Apparently, their mother had set them down in the morning and told them we were getting divorced. She said she was going to do all she could to make sure things didn’t change too much for the kids.
She claimed she didn’t want to get divorced, but that I, their father, did. When my daughter asked why, she claimed I was becoming a very angry man, and I thought she did something she shouldn’t do. I was appalled. I wanted to confront my wife immediately, but my daughter calmed me down.
She told me not to lose control. She’s such a mature girl. She told me she didn’t believe her mom. She knew the kind of person I was, so she knew it didn’t align with what Victoria had told them.
She wanted to make sure she could believe her mom before accepting what she’d been told. I was speechless. I wasn’t planning to drag the kids into the details, but I felt I had no choice. I told my daughter the truth.
I told her her mother had cheated, and I showed her the pictures from the PI. I acknowledged the picture itself didn’t prove anything intimate, but I made her compare the timestamps between the pictures and the video I’d taken of Victoria telling me where she’d been that day. Her mother had been the one lying, not me. I told her the shouting they’d heard had been me confronting their mom, not me being an angry man.
Even my daughter could acknowledge that after being married for so long, anyone would flip out like that. I was glad she understood. As I explained, I could see her getting more and more angry. She asked me just once whether I thought I’d be able to reconcile with her mom.
I told her there was unfortunately no chance. I saw her eyes start to well up when she accepted that. I didn’t want them to grow up in a broken home, but in this case, it was really beyond my power. She’d left me no choice.
I don’t know how I’m supposed to manage my home from this point going forward. Their mom is likely still going to be in the house until the divorce is finalized, but I need to figure out how to make the atmosphere remain tolerable for the kids. That’s probably the most important thing for me to sort. I don’t think there’s a true moral to the story.
I want to say don’t trust anyone, but you can’t go through life like that. Perhaps I should just say that anyone can betray you. Keep that in mind while you trust people. Even when you’ve been married for as long as I have, things can still go wrong, and I find that to be absolutely tragic.
Update: I haven’t been active on this website for a long time since my last post because I was dealing with a lot of BS. I’m very happy to say that things have finally started to settle into a new normal. As much as I’m not one to shamelessly enjoy Schadenfreude, things aren’t going great for Victoria, and I don’t mind that. The first thing I need to mention is that after I told my daughter the truth with evidence to back it up, she started to give my wife the cold shoulder.
That resulted in Victoria pulling my daughter aside one day to ask why she was angry at her and not me. My daughter didn’t tell her that I’d told her the truth. Instead, she just walked out on her. That would normally be something I’d scold her for, but in this case, there was no reason to.
My daughter told the other kids, aged 10 and 9, and they weren’t as discreet. That was how Victoria found out that I knew she’d jumped the gun and told the kids about things. It was obviously a discussion that was meant to be had together, but nope, she chose to get ahead of me so she could control the narrative, and it was backfiring on her pretty badly. She couldn’t come to complain about it though, because it was all her doing.
I knew it was getting to her, because she loves being a mother. It’s one of the things that made me fall even deeper in love with her after we got married and started our family. She was being deprived of one of the truest joys in life, and I didn’t really care that she was starting to seem depressed about it, because she’d done that to herself. The divorce came and went.
The judge ruled that we would share custody, and she would keep the house, despite evidence of her affair. I hate the way the system decides to coddle women, even when they straight-up cheat. It’s silly, and it will probably not end anytime soon. I moved out, which was accompanied by a lot of tears from my children.
They were staying in the same house with their mom, so not much was changing for them beyond me being pulled out of the equation. I imagined that one change was going to prove to be very different for them, but there wasn’t anything I could do to soften the blow. I just promised I was going to do my best to set up my new place as quickly as possible, and I did do that. The first time they came to see me, they had an absolute blast.
Despite their parents having just gotten divorced, they didn’t seem to be in the worst of moods. I was glad for that much. I fully understood what was going on when, the week after that, I went to pick them up, and Victoria said she wanted to talk to me. She looked like she hadn’t been getting enough sleep, or like she’d been overthinking a lot.
She told me she was heartbroken, and she wasn’t looking for me to take her back, but she needed me to talk to the kids on her behalf. I asked what she needed from me, and that’s when it all became very clear to me. I didn’t think it would last, but the kids seemed to hate her. That’s what she came to the conclusion of at least.
She asked what I had then told them about her, and I let her know that I’d only told them the truth. She had wanted to control the narrative by lying about me, and all I did was set the record straight so that my kids wouldn’t think things about me which weren’t true. She started crying there. I was shocked by that.
She said, “Why? ” through her tears. But when I gave her a quizzical expression befitting of that dumb question, she stopped looking for an answer. She told me the kids hated her because they knew the truth.
She loved them, and it was killing her from the inside out knowing that they didn’t love her back. I told her they were going to get over it, but she didn’t believe me. She thought they’d never forgive her. I genuinely thought it was excessive, but I didn’t try and convince her otherwise.
I told her I had to go. She asked if she could call me later, but I just shook my head at her. I was not going to be her shoulder to cry on because she was facing the consequences of her actions. She had to be joking to think that I was going to be there for her in any way that court hadn’t mandated.
She’s called me on numerous occasions now under the guise of talking about something the kids need, but it will end up with her wanting to pour out her heart and how they hate her. Our daughter’s being straight-up rude to her. The younger ones not as much, but they are getting a bit harder for her to control and instruct. And I know they’re picking it up from their sister.
I know that even if I try to talk to my daughter, she’ll do whatever she wants in this regard. So, I’m leaving it to Victoria to deal with. The last time she tried to call me to cry about everything, I told her to go and tell it to her affair partner. Our marriage was over because of him, so she might as well put him to good use.
She cursed me out while crying and came back later to apologize, but I ignored her. She started to realize how much she’s ruined. And I need that realization to keep hitting her in the face. I’m not going to be there to help soften the blow.
Cheating is bad enough. Lying about it is worse. But then trying to get the kids first and paint you as the angry husband, that was the part that really got me. She wasn’t trying to protect him.
She was trying to protect herself. If your daughter hadn’t trusted her gut enough to come talk to you, your kids could have spent who knows how long thinking you were the one who blew up the family. I honestly don’t blame you for telling your daughter the truth. You didn’t choose to involve the kids.
Your ex did the second she decided to spin the story before you even had a chance to talk to them together. At that point, you were just correcting a lie. And then, she starts calling you because she’s heartbroken that the kids aren’t mad at her? What was she expecting?
Of course they’re hurt. They found out their mom cheated, lied to their dad, and then tried to make him look like the bad guy. That’s a lot for adults to process, never mind kids.
Do you think she was right to tell his daughter the truth after his wife lied to the kids first?
