My Son Was Told to Keep a Secret So His Father Could Betray Us — I Made Sure He Never Had to Carry It Again

His eyes narrowed.

“Did my mother talk to you?”

“She did.”

And with that, he seemed to decide the game was over, and he stopped bothering to deny it, and what came out of him instead was worse than any denial.

He told me, with a strange rehearsed conviction, that he loved Jennifer, that our marriage had been “dead for years,” that I had always cared more about my career than about my home.

He recited it like a man reading his own alibi, and I understood that he had told himself this story so many times, in the dark, over eighteen months, that he had come to believe it was true — that the lie had been necessary to make him comfortable with what he was doing, and now the lie was all he had.