His Affair Lived in Messages:

I have read every one of them. Forty-one thousand. I can tell you what my husband said to her at 2:14 in the morning four years ago. I cannot tell you what he said to me at breakfast.

Nobody tells you about the archive.

You don't find out. You're not a detective assembling a case out of small wrong things. His laptop was open on mine, and it took forty seconds, and there it was: four years and two months, timestamped, in order, complete.

There's a search function. I typed my own name into it. Two hundred and six results.

He was never cruel about me. Not once, in four years. Do you know what I'd give for one bitchy line at 2 a.m.? One my wife doesn't understand me? I'd give the house. Because then he'd be a man having an affair, and I'd be a wife who'd been wronged, and everybody knows the shape of that. There are songs.

Instead, at 1:40 in the morning, he wrote: She's the best person I know. I just can't talk to her.

He never met her. Never sent a photograph. Nothing happened, a lawyer told me. In the eyes of a court, nothing has happened here.

Here's what happened here.

In there, my husband is funny. He is hilarious, and quick, and open, and he talks about his dead father for two hundred pages, and I have six sentences. He asks questions constantly. He is curious.

I met my husband for the first time in his messages to another woman.

And she wasn't beautiful, and she wasn't clever, and I have read every word she wrote and she is nothing. She asked him questions and she waited. She didn't steal my husband. She interviewed him.

Now he's downstairs making my coffee at ten past seven the way he has for fourteen years, and I'm upstairs at eleven o'clock at night with him in my hand, and both of them are August Marchand, and I can only have one.

I know which one I want. That's the part I can't say out loud.

One-click if you love: the other woman who never appears, heroine you can't quite forgive, a marriage worth saving and the price of it.