I have tried, since, to explain to people why the tenderness in those messages hurt worse than any photograph could have, and it is difficult to make them understand.

A physical affair is a betrayal of the body, and bodies, God knows, are weak and foolish things, and a marriage can sometimes survive that kind of weakness.

But what I found on that screen was not weakness.

It was choice, sustained over years.

It was the deliberate redirection of a man’s entire inner life, the part of him that noticed and remembered and cared, away from his wife and toward someone new, while he kept living in my house and sleeping in my bed and letting me believe the coldness between us was just what happens to marriages over time.

He had not lost his capacity for love.