Author's note: I know that I need an editor, so if anyone wants to volunteer for the future, please message me. I wrote this on a lark....just had it bubbling in my head. Nothing terribly new or terribly exciting....just an exploration of how fast things can go from good to bad. Not a lot of BTB, but a happier ending for the victim is sometimes the best revenge.
There are some statements that should only trigger a happy response. My wife telling me that she was pregnant was one of them. If she'd had health issues and we hadn't been planning on a baby that might have changed things, but we'd already been through the health evaluation. The doctor assured us that from a physiological stand point we were perfectly ready to get pregnant.
"I'm pregnant." Jenny couldn't meet my eyes when she said it. We'd talked about having children together since we became an exclusive couple in college. We knew the names that we wanted to use, depending on if it was a boy or a girl. We even had a plan for how far apart we wanted to space them.
"Well, that kind of changes things, doesn't it?" I was subdued and exhausted at this point. If I hadn't been the shock and pain of her revelation would have been unbearable. My plans for the future had changed so much in the last three weeks and adding this piece of information didn't help. I was only back in our house sitting across the kitchen table talking to her because it was the final stipulation to get her to sign the divorce papers. We'd made small talk when I first got there, but it was all very meaningless. Clearly, she wanted to tell me to my face about the child she was carrying.
"I know the answer, but I have to ask. Is there any way that we can work through this? I love you so much and I know how badly I've hurt you, but I just can't believe that there is no way to fix things." Tears rolled down Jenny's cheeks for the millionth time and I realized that I no longer felt the same. The need to comfort her, to tell her that everything was going to be alright was gone. Inside I was awash in sorrow, anger and a truckload of betrayal that I'd never seen coming.
"There's no way that it's mine, is there? I mean, since we haven't slept together since I left for the last business trip in February it doesn't seem possible." I was losing my best friend, the person I planned to spend forever with. If somehow the baby she was carrying was mine then there was some tiny spark of hope that we could find a way to stay together.
"No. I'm so sorry..." Jenny stood up from the kitchen table we'd been sitting at and headed upstairs to the master bedroom we no longer shared. I guess the look on my face told her what she needed to know. There was no way I was going to raise the product of her infidelity as my own child. She was going to get to deal with that aspect of her cheating all on her own. I got up, looked around our kitchen one last time and left for good.
Three weeks ago, I had just gotten home from a month-long business trip that had taken me all over the country. I'd rushed up to our home office to add some details that I had been finishing on the plane before sending the finished product in. As fate would have it, my laptop chose that moment to die. I didn't store anything locally on it, so it wasn't a catastrophe, but I needed to finish up my work while it was still fresh. I'd grabbed Jenny's computer and, after getting her to login, I'd jumped back into the project.
One of the side effects of all the web-based services that we use is that we forget that things overlap. Jenny's company and my company both used the same web-based platform. We met while she was studying art and I was studying electrical engineering in college. Jenny went on to become a lawyer and works on copyright infringement cases and makes a lot of money doing it. I'm a network engineer and do consulting for multi-national companies to help them build secure infrastructure to keep their networks up and running around the globe. We end up logging in to the same service with different user names and passwords for normal email, but have VPN connectivity for sensitive work-related stuff.
As I was logging into webmail I wasn't really paying attention until I noticed that in addition to Jenny's account that I knew about there was another account called French_whore. I was kind of surprised and my curiosity got the better of me. Sadly, the password credential for the unfamiliar account was already stored in her browser. As I read, I felt like I was being led through one of the Holocaust museums that have been built on the site of the concentration camps in Europe. The horror is palpable as you take in the meaning of what they are showing you. I've always fallen silent when I toured those reminders of just how deeply into depravity humans can dive. That's how I felt as I read Jenny's messages with her lover.
I'm a quick study and it only took me about 30 minutes to gather the pertinent details. He was a former client. He was a French artist/designer of African descent and Jenny had worked with him for almost a year before getting him a large settlement for infringement. I could remember her talking about him a little; something about how talented he was. They had not become lovers until after the case was finished, as far as I could tell, and her firm had sent him the notice that they were no longer his attorneys of record. That was just a normal, final step after a one time case had been finalized and there were no more financial strings between them.
I couldn't tell if they had been flirting during the case or exactly when the actual affair started. The messages I read only told part of the story, but they went back at least 6 months. To say that I was in shock was a mild understatement. I had the presence of mind to forward the pictures and video to a separate account so that I could access them again if needed.
Jenny was sitting in our family room when I came back downstairs with her computer. She had a cup of something hot in her hands as she rested on the comfortable lounger that looked out onto our back yard. It was early April and the trees were starting to bud out, but it was still a bit cool in the evenings. She looked so beautiful with her long dark hair and fair complexion offset by the cashmere sweater and leggings she wore. I couldn't know, but she was already pregnant at that point and perhaps she glowed that much more from the magic of the new life she carried.
"Dave, what's wrong?? You look like you've seen a ghost." Jenny had set her mug on the end table and turned to look at me when she'd seen the look on my face. I knew that I was in trouble and my emotions were quickly getting the better of me. I clicked on the start button of the video of my wife and her, made sure the volume was loud and then set the laptop down with the screen facing her.
"Oh no...no...please, Dave." The shock on her face lasted briefly, followed by tears and sorrow. Jenny's dark eyes turned to meet mine as she begged me to let her explain. Under most other circumstances the sight of my beloved wife crying and reaching out to me would have been impossible to resist.
