text: The Day It All Changed December 23, 2018. That was the day it all changed. That was the day I was sure that my whole life had changed. That was the day I read his texts...to Joseline...for the second time. I hated myself as I opened his iPad, managed to enter the correct passcode, and read the exchange between the two of them that ended with him asking her if was going to “scoop” him, gave her a nearby address and there was mention of him asking her for “sloppy top” and her asking him if he was going to “blow her back out.” I know, gross. Who talks like that? We did in jest at times, particularly when we were discussing some second rate sort of woman; some sort of chick who you didn’t build a relationship with. However, I digress. I went through his iPad. I went through his ipad because I awoke a little before midnight, as he was traipsing around the house in the night. I had gone to bed early because I was feeling quite ill for the past few days and felt like I needed it. When I got up, I asked him, via text, if he wanted to watch tv with me. He said he was “good”. I came downstairs a few minutes later because now I was *UP* up. I had gone to sleep around 7:30pm, when Lily was still watching tv. Anyway, I came downstairs and I could smell cologne. He hadn’t worn cologne in ages. I asked him if he had on cologne and he said no. But I smelled it. The whole living room smelled like it. I thought for a moment that he had maybe sprayed it to mask over the weed smell. He often stayed awake long after everyone else in the house was long asleep, smoking. But I walked past the living room and into the eat-in kitchen and saw a bottle of mostly gone wine on the breakfast table. A glance over to the tv stand and I see another. He’s been drinking. He’s inebriated. I pause and ask “What’s up?” He goes on about some game he just watched...I’m not sure if it was basketball or football because he loved both. He’s been watching a lot of games ever since I agreed to let him order all the sports networks about a month ago, even though I was already tight for money. He said some things about the game he watched and then that he was headed to the casino with Chris. Lightbulb. He said he was going to the casino a couple months ago. Correction. He said he was at the casino a couple months ago. He said that when he had been gone for a few days and then he couldn’t catch the train home from Ottentown because it was a Sunday night. What he didn’t know was that I had paid the damn $10 or $20 dollars to look up Joseline’s address months before. The site gave 3 possiles, but I knew Ottentown was one of them. I knew her address was a mile or so away from the train stop. He’d been known to walk several miles often. He often walked from our house to the train which is about a mile and a half. I went to pick him up that night. I took our daughter out of her bed asleep and drove the 45 minutes to Ottentown to pick him up. He was drunk then too. Anyway, Chris is his friend, I think. He talks about him sometimes. He said he was going to go to the casino with Chris and pay nickel slots and maybe get Chris to give him some of the money he owes him. My sensors were going off. He was lying again. What grown man, forty-two years old, goes out on the town at 2am? Yes, it was now 2am. I had stepped out several times for a smoke and kind of waited around for him to say something...anything. I wanted him to say “No, I love you. I’m staying here. I’m glad you feel better. Let’s snuggle.” But no, he just continued on his plans, so it was now 2am. IN a last ditch effort to kind of send the message that I knew something was amiss, I asked him if Chris was coming to the house to get him. He said he had to get some Black and Milds or something...some excuse for why a friend wouldn’t pick him up at the house door at 2am. He asked me what would make me feel better about him leaving. I told him “If I knew that we were a “we”, I would have less trepidation about you going out.” He kind of stopped and looked at me. He said “I understand what you’re saying.” But, not in a consoling kind of way. It wasn’t followed with any kind of reassurance. I asked him for a hug and he gave me one. Then, he was gone. I waited for a few minutes after he left and I picked up his ipad. I fiddled with the passcode for a bit, then I got in. I saw that there were two text message streams. One was me. He had me labeled as Michelle. That’s my middle name. The other was a slew of emoji’s. That one was Joseline. I know it was her because I checked the info tab and saw her number. I knew her number. I had memorized it. I had looked it up and called it from my google phone number so many times. I never responded when she spoke. I just called to hear her voice, as of I was going to get some sort of information from whatever words she uttered on the other end. She never said anything but “Hello.” But back to the text messages. There I scrolled a bit...just a bit, and among his last few messages was confirmation that he had invited her to pick him up near our home together and that they had plans to sleep together. Everything changed. At 2:30am, I started calling him. He didn’t pick up. I thought it was bullshit, because (I forgot to mention earlier) that he asked me if I wanted him to facetime me from dollar slots and with Chris to quell my fears about him going out. He responds via text: “What?” “Can you come back right now?” “For what?” “This is important.” “What’s up?” “I know.” “U know what?!” “Go ahead...” “I need you to come home or not at all. My mind isn’t playing tricks on me. It’s not my insecurities.” “NOT @ all” I sent him a photo of the messages I saw. I called him a liar and a cheater. He asked if I had been tracking his texts. I hadn’t. I did a few months ago when I first found out about Joseline. But I had since turned on the app, because I thought we were moving forward and “trusting” one another now. But I looked. Tonight, everything was so strange, so I looked. I found what I thought I would find. At about 2:45am, I called him and he picked up. We started arguing. He said I was in the wrong for checking his messages. He wouldn’t own up to doing anything wrong. He kept saying “We’re not in a relationship! We’re not in a relationship!” Granted, technically, we had not said emphatically that we were a couple. But, he still lived here. We had been having unprotected sex for the last month or so. We were following my fertility tracker and trying to get pregnant again. He was here for Thanksgiving. We set up for Christmas. I just took Lily out to buy him gifts the day before. The gifts I ordered him just arrived a day earlier; the gifts I bought him anyway even though I said that we didn’t have to get each other anything because he didn’t have any money because I wanted him to get some things on Christmas. He was sleeping next to me nightly. But now, I was nothing. I was not in a relationship with him. He kept saying that he would be back tomorrow to get his clothes. I was adamant that that wasn’t a possibility. He thought I meant I was going to damage them in some way. But I wasn’t thinking of that. I wasn’t thinking of anything. I was trying to be strong and stand my ground. He eventually hung up on me. I stood around for a few minutes, fuming. For the first time in months, I was more angry than hurt. I wasn’t breaking down in a heap of tears and hyperventilating. I wasn’t feeling sorry for myself. I took the opportunity to do the unthinkable. I picked up my phone and for the first time, not from a google phone number, from my own phone number, I called Joseline. I think the phone rang twice before Joseline picked up. She answered. “Hello.” I wasn’t going to back out this time. I was going to talk to her. I was going to eviscerate her with words. I was going to give her a piece of my mind. But, that isn’t what happened. Joseline answered politely. I asked her about her plans for the night and then told her who I was. I asked her if Nick was going to see her and she said yes. I asked her if she had been sleeping with Nick and she said yes. Unprotected? Yes. She was pregnant over the summer and had a miscarriage. I wonder if that’s what Nick was talking about earlier in the summer when he was in a deep depression and he said he was afraid to tell me something he thought would ruin us. I asked at the time if she was pregnant and he said no. She must’ve already lost it. She said he told her he loved her over the summer and that he had never felt this way about anyone before. He had stuff at her house. He had stayed there many times before. He went to her son’s birthday party. This shit is deep. I told her that he still lives with me. The white truck you thought was his? Mine. He lives alone? We co-parent? No and no. He has lived with me for nearly eleven years...*eleven years*. Since he lost his job, I have paid for everything, even before. I pay the rent, utilities, her tuition, *his* phone. I even pay monthly for a goddam loan he had me take out after he couldn’t afford the rent for his turn and forged a check in my name. This all sounds really fucekd up as I write it out. But, I was hearing and seeing what I wanted to hear and see. I believed what I wanted to believe. She said she was so taken aback because he knew that she was a child who saw her father do this. And now he was doing it to someone as well. She said she was done with him. She would try to three way call me when he got in her car. We hung up. A few minutes later, she called me back. She said she saw him, he got in the car and she told him that she just had a very interesting conversation with me. He apparently got mad and stormed off. I continued to talk to her like we were friends. We compared stories. I didn’t know he was fired. She didn’t know he didn’t have a savings. I didn’t know he wanted to be with her. She didn’t know he’d never truly left me. We ended the call when he came through the door. He was mad. I have only seen him this mad two other times. I thought he could hurt me. The first time he did. He choked me years ago our of anger. We stayed apart for about a month but I begged him to come back and he did. Yep. There it is. It seems like sort of a pattern here, right? It was always me begging him to come back and break me down more. Its like I never felt as though I was worthy and I kept asking for more pain for the sake of being the girl who “made it”, the girl who found someone, fell in love, and stayed with him until the day she died. No, we weren’t married. I always seemed to write that off as being ok because we were a different sort of couple and didn’t need to meet the status quo. But here he was walking through the door. He was steaming mad. He ran upstairs and started throwing luggage down the stairs. It was so loud. One hit me. He was throwing down clothes, shoes hangers. I knew he would wake up our daughter. He was yelling about me “having won” and that I was a “petty bitch.” Everything in me kept wanting to say that wasn’t what petty ment. But I knew it wouldn’t make anything better. He screamed in my face a lot. He scared me. He woke up our daughter. He kept screaming in my face that he didn’t love me and that anything I thought I was working toward was over and done. He told me to go kill myself. He said he’d get me a knife. This man, who I loved with everything in me...who I needed so desperately to love me back, was telling me to kill myself. It hurt more than anything he could ever do to me. It felt like a searing hot knife entering my chest. He stared at me with conviction. He was sure he felt this way. But I couldn’t back down. I kept asking. I wanted to know why he’d say something so cruel, why he’d be so mean. I wanted to know what his plan was. Was he going to stay with me through the holidays and then just leave? We had been joking about marriage the other day. Did he ever really love me? Were we truly *trying* anything? What happened? What made me so unlovable? Silence. Silence and angry yelling about my *petty* actions was the cycle that would continue for the next 2.5 hours. Finally, sometime after 6am, he walked away from me. He walked into the basement and locked himself in the downstairs bedroom. Its 6 hours later and I still haven’t seen him.