Normality! Sweet, contented normality!
The next few days passed as if the previous tumultuous months hadn't happened. My husband Pete and I got up together, had breakfast together and went to our separate places of work where, for the first time in weeks, I was able to concentrate properly on my job and not my impossibly complicated private life.
We had dinner with friends, we went for a walk at the weekend, we watched TV in the evenings; we even made love twice without my infidelities being mentioned.
I heard nothing from Will; I heard nothing from Izzy. All very dull, all very boring, all just perfect after everything that had passed.
I began to remember what a normal marriage could be like, even though I did not really have one and would probably never have one again.
I didn't go to the gym at the sports club; the memory of what Will and I had done in the Ladies' changing room was too fresh in my mind. Instead I donned my calf-length tights and pink vest and went for runs along tree-lines country roads near our house.
I even began writing again, the ideas simply flooded in, demanding to be put down on metaphorical paper before they floated away to be replaced with even more vivid and even more extreme plotlines.
My email correspondence was resumed too, picking up conversations with several of my online cuckold friends and replying to messages from several readers. To my delight, one of my two long-term online female pen friends had written to let me know that her first act of infidelity had now taken place and had gone well -- very well in fact. She was both nervous and excited and needed to tell someone all about it. In my role as anonymous correspondent I was a perfect confessor.
I have to admit I felt very envious as she poured her excited feelings into her words. Memories of my first seduction by Tony came flooding back into my mind as I read her words. Despite all that has happened since, that first passionate, unplanned step into infidelity remains one of the most arousing and exciting moments of my life.
I hadn't heard from my other female pen friend for some weeks -- maybe a couple of months. Her introduction into the life less monogamous had taken place perhaps a year ago at the instigation of her husband. Apparently an avid reader of cuckold stories including mine, he had put pressure on his wife for a long time, much the way Pete had done with me. He had introduced her to my stories as a means of showing her the pleasures a change in their lifestyle might bring, especially as many of mine were written from the female point of view. She and I had exchanged messages. Eventually she had given in to her husband's pressure, an evening with a male friend had been arranged and, according to her messages afterwards, all had gone well.
I wondered briefly what had stopped her from writing.
There were of course a handful of troll attacks from the usual suspects too but among them was a second, vitriolic message from a new source. As before, the style of message was much more personal than the simple, obnoxious abuse most troll messages contain and for a moment it puzzled and upset me.
But I was getting much better at ignoring these horrible things and concentrating on the nicer parts of my online life; the only secret I still kept from my husband. I deleted the message and moved on with my extraordinarily normal day.
The only evidence that my life was not normal were the two hours of blessedly moderating nausea I suffered every morning courtesy of the baby growing in my womb. Try as I might, I could not prevent this discomfort from reminding me that the biggest decision facing us had still not been made; what to do about my pregnancy.
As the days and weeks advanced, the choices open to us were becoming more limited in their scope and more severe in their implementation. The magic twelve week watershed was fast approaching; the time beyond which the pregnancy could be considered 'safe' and I was more likely to carry the baby through to term than to spontaneously miscarry.
Beyond twelve weeks, only a more serious miscarriage or the unthinkable termination would bring my pregnancy to an end but more urgently, the bump in my belly would begin to be visible to more than just my husband and me. Given the high proportion of our friends who like us, had medical backgrounds, any sign of pregnancy would be spotted very quickly indeed.
For those few precious days I was able to put even these issues from my mind but deep down I knew this domestic bliss couldn't last. So I should not have been surprised by the sudden, unwanted way in which it ended.
As so often in my life, it all began with the buzzing of my mobile phone, this time at eleven-thirty on Wednesday evening, thereby denying me the completion of even a single week of a life that might be considered unremarkable.
It was of course, my daughter Isobel. Who else would call so late on a weekday night? Pete and I were in bed together but, as a testament to the degree normality had returned, we had not had sex, were in our pyjamas and Pete was already asleep. I was reading my book.
When the phone began to ring and I saw who it was, I quickly got out from under the duvet, carried my buzzing handset downstairs and took the call in the kitchen full of trepidation.
"Mum?"
Even from hearing that single word I could tell from her voice that my daughter was on the verge of tears and big ones too.
"Izzy! What's wrong?" I asked immediately.
"I've been dumped," she said with a huge gulp. "Again."
And then the tears began.
"Oh Izzy!" I exclaimed. "I'm so sorry."
For several minutes all I could do was sit and make soothing noises as, four hours drive away, my twenty-year-old daughter sobbed into the phone. From time to time half-intelligible words would appear but then they would be swept away by resumed heartfelt tears.
Eventually either my words of sympathy had an effect or she managed to pull herself together on her own but finally I managed to decipher the noises that filled my ear.
"I got hold of Simon. We just talked for an hour. It's all over Mum."
"I'm so sorry," I repeated.
"It was horrible, Mum. Horrible!"
"I'm sure it was, Izzy. I'm sure it was."
She was calming down a little but was still very upset.
"Tell me what happened," I encouraged her.
She sniffed and blew her nose down the phone before replying.
"He said it's finished. It's over. I'm history."
"Was he as nasty as that?"
"Oh he tried to be nice at first, saying it wasn't me, it was him; that the long distance relationship wasn't working..."
She paused.
"Was it working?" I asked
"We could have made it work Mum."
I had always doubted that a distance of five hours could be overcome so easily so early in a relationship but I also seriously doubted that this was the real reason for his change of heart.
"I told him we could manage it if we tried but then he said he felt guilty about breaking up me and Steve."
That could be true but sounded unlikely to me too.
"I told him it that was okay too; that Steve was with Lauren but he said he can't stop thinking about the two of us together."
I could imagine that easily; after all, he probably had a video of the two of them fucking to help him picture it.
"So you think it's something else?" I asked innocently.
