[This is the first part of a two-part story; the second part will appear tomorrow. I am very grateful to GaryAPB for reading a draft of this story and making a number of terrific suggestions.]
DISCOVERY
February 10
He would never have found out if his hard drive hadn't crashed. He would have lived the rest of his life in blissful ignorance—a happy fool. Would that have been better or worse?
It was a Friday night in February in Painesville, Ohio, and Dan Flood was working on his Fantasy League Baseball team when the computer began to act up. As a systems engineer, he knew enough to immediately back up all his files onto zip disks.
So when the computer went haywire an hour later, and nothing he could do would get it working again, he wasn't that concerned. He'd have to take it in to the computer place over in Euclid the next day for repairs, but nothing was lost.
On the other hand, he was eager to keep working on his baseball team, and frustrated not to have a computer. Then he remembered his wife's old machine, sitting untouched in the basement since she'd switched to a new laptop about six months earlier. They'd never gotten around to throwing it out. It was a slower machine, but it would do fine for his team.
Dan didn't have to ask Susan if he could use it. For one thing it was a discarded computer. For another, she was away. Susan and her sister Lynne had taken their widowed mom on a ten-day Caribbean cruise for her 60th birthday. They'd agreed not to call one another during the cruise, since ship-to-shore was so expensive. Susan had left two days earlier and wouldn't be back until next weekend.
When Dan had dusted off the old PC and booted it up, he was annoyed to find that the whole thing was password-protected. Why had Susan done that, since only he and she were ever in the house?
He tried the passwords that they normally used, things like birthdays and nicknames, without success. He almost gave up in frustration, but decided instead to think it through.
Susan had gotten this computer two and half years earlier, in May or June of 2003. Dan remembered because it was just a few weeks after her car accident. A driver swerved to avoid a six-year old who had run into the street, and the result was a terrible crash in which Susan had lost the five-month old fetus she was carrying. Worse still, after the surgery the doctors had told Susan she'd be unable to bear children in the future. She would never be a mother.
Thinking about that terrible time, Dan had a thought. They had already picked out the name Sean for their son-to-be, since ultrasound had shown he would be a boy. Dan tried a couple of password combinations with Sean in them; the third one, "Sean03", unlocked the files.
Dan had intended just to trash all the documents, leaving plenty of room for his baseball statistics, but a file on the desktop made him stop. It was labeled "Teddy".
Dan didn't know that Susan knew a Teddy, though the assistant principal at the school where Susan taught fifth grade was named Theodore O'Neill. He was a tall, pleasant-looking guy with sandy hair, maybe about five years younger than Susan and Dan, who were both 36.
The "Teddy" folder was full of email messages between Susan and a "Teddy19@aol.com". Curious, Dan clicked on one to open it. In that moment his life changed dramatically.
*****
July 23, 2003
Baby—
God, you were amazing today—I've never cum so hard in my whole life! You just turned me inside out.
I'm not sure I can get away Thursday, because Dan might be coming home from work early. I'll write you tomorrow to see if we can be together Friday.
I can hardly wait!
xxoo
Susan
*****
Dan sat frozen, staring at the screen. There was no possible way the message could mean anything other than what it seemed to mean. His wife had fucked another man—had been regularly fucking another man, in fact.
He wasn't sure he was even thinking. He may just have been sitting. He heard the kitchen clock's tick echo through the quiet house, heard the whoosh of a car's tires passing outside. Fragmentary images of his wife swirled through his mind: Susan's loving kiss before she left for the cruise; the way she shook her fist at him when she was jokingly pretending to be angry; her gasps when she orgasmed during sex; her sad, devastated face in the hospital when he went in to see her after surgery, both of them knowing they'd never have children.
He knew he should be angry, but he wasn't there yet. The shock was too great, and despite the very clear evidence in front of him on the screen Dan knew he just didn't believe it yet.
All thoughts of baseball long gone, he eventually roused himself and began to look through the file of email messages. It never once even occurred to him that he already knew enough, that he could have spared himself further pain.
He began by going to the end. The last email he found was from Susan to Teddy19 in early September 2003.
*****
September 8
Teddy:
I meant it when I said we had to stop. You knew this couldn't continue, you knew I love Dan and I don't want to lose him.
Please, baby, don't make this harder for me than it already is. Every time I see you in the hall--- Just please, please, let me do what I have to do!
If you can't let go, if we can't be professional about it, then I'll just have to move to another school. Teddy, if you care for me, let it be over—please accept it.
Susan
*****
Going back chronologically, Dan found a flurry of messages back and forth at the end of August. Susan was determined to break off the affair, and Teddy—who clearly was Theodore O'Neill, the assistant principal—was trying to keep her involved in it. He said he adored her, couldn't imagine his life without their private time together, etc. But while Susan wasn't sick of Teddy, she was firm about ending it. She was worried about her marriage—not only about Dan finding out but about the strains that had arisen between them.
Still numb, still reeling, Dan thought back to the summer of 2003. How could he have been so fucking clueless?
It had been a terrible time. Susan's accident cost them not only what would have been their first-born child but any chance of having a family. He had brought up adoption, but Susan had just been too shattered to consider it. Dan desperately wanted a family, and he wanted to keep talking about it, but he understood that Susan just couldn't face the reality yet, that she would never bear her own kids.
She'd been distant, withdrawn, and deeply depressed for weeks, through June and into the summer vacation. All of Dan's kindness and affection and patience she'd received with a kind of weary acceptance. She was never angry or unkind; it was more as though she were experiencing life—or at least her connection with her husband---through a kind of screen.
After several weeks Dan was nearly at the end of his rope. He wondered whether he and Susan should simply divorce—it wasn't something he wanted, but there didn't seem to be any marriage left, or really any relationship at all.
He took a long walk one afternoon, trying to figure out what to do. What kept coming into his mind were his wedding vows, especially "for better and for worse" and "in sickness and in health". And he realized that he couldn't simply end his marriage, not at a time when Susan was in such desperate straits. He owed her more than that. He would keep trying to reach her, until there was simply no hope left.
In early July, a deeply worried Dan enlisted the help of Susan's doctor to talk her into starting therapy. Her work with Dr. Branden had gradually helped bring her out of her depression. Dan vividly remembered the day that had always seemed like the turning point.
On a Tuesday in the last week of August Susan had surprised him by cooking an extra-fancy dinner. Afterwards they sat on the couch and she held his hand.
"Honey, I've put you through hell this summer, and I'm so sorry."
He started to protest, but she silenced him. "No, Dan, it's true. I didn't do it on purpose. But I was just so . . . so sad about the baby. And you were trying so hard to reach out to me, to comfort me, and I was just keeping you at a distance.
"Dr. Branden has helped me see things so much more clearly. She called it clinical depression. I never gave you the chance to grieve with me, for us to grieve together. I didn't mean to, but I shut you out, and each of us suffered through this alone.
"I want to come back to you. I want to be totally your wife again; I want us to talk about everything, and deal with everything in our lives together.
"I love you so much, Dan," she concluded, tenderly, and he pulled her into a long embrace.
They went straight to bed together and made love slowly and sweetly. Their sex life had dwindled almost to nothing in the time since the accident—Dan guessed they hadn't had sex more than four times in the three preceding months—but after that the passion returned with a vengeance.
For a few weeks Susan was energetic and eager, dragging Dan into bed at least 4-5 times a week, being as exciting and giving a lover as she had been during their courtship and honeymoon. During the course of the fall, it had gradually subsided a bit. But even now, Dan reflected that their sexual relationship and the rest of their marriage over the past two years had been terrific.
He knew that Susan loved him, and that she wanted their marriage as much as he did. Until opening those fucking emails he had had no reason whatever to doubt her affection or her fidelity.
Reconstructing his memories of that time, and putting them together with her emails, Dan began to see how the pieces fit together. Susan had somehow begun the affair in the summer of 2003—clearly by July it was in full swing. She'd started seeing Dr. Branden, and perhaps that had helped her decide to end the affair and recommit herself to her marriage.
Whatever the impetus, she must have told Teddy it was over sometime in late August, then come to Dan, apologized for her distance from him (without confessing to the affair, of course!), and fucked his brains out for a few weeks.
