Can A Marriage Survive The Ultimate Betrayal?

Jayne Warwick reveals how her husband discovered her affair. But the biggest surprise was what happened next…

- Jayne Warwick

The message, sent from my husband’s email address, stopped me in my tracks: ‘I know you’ve had an affair.’ Feeling sick, I forced myself to think rationally. He couldn’t possibly know. The eight-week affair happened last summer and I’d had no contact with my ex-lover since he deleted me from his life as though I had never existed.

I’d wiped all incriminating messages from my usual email address, and the private account that I’d set up for illicit communications was secured with a password that nobody could ever guess.

How best to respond? With a confession? A plea for forgiveness? No. He was calling my bluff. The best thing was to deny everything, just as he had done throughout our 12-year marriage, even when faced with irrefutable evidence of his one-night stands.

‘I have no idea what you’re talking about,’ I responded. To my horror, cut-and-pasted segments of emails between me and my ex-lover started pouring into my inbox.

It turned out that I hadn’t been quite as careful as I thought. The affair may have long since finished, but I couldn’t resist occasionally logging into my secret account to re-read my ex’s messages. Three weeks ago, my husband found this email account open on a computer we rarely used. My life had blown up because I’d quite simply forgotten to log out.

There it all was, in unsparing detail: the breathless desire for the younger man (me 49 and him 41) who had turned my life around and then broken my heart.

We’d met by chance at our children’s cricket club. In a matter of weeks, the relationship turned physical.

Tables have turned

I stared at the computer screen and at the family photographs of my husband and me looking like we were happy, keeping up the pretence for our four children.