Page 36 of Choosing Hope

Sophie

My marriage is slipping through my fingers. I haven’t slept in three days. Spencer hasn’t been home once; just a nightly text about late meetings and early mornings, like that somehow makes it okay.

The situation between us is going from bad to worse; it’s literally breaking my heart.

Seven or eight months after Lily’s birth, it became quite normal for him to come home after I’d gone to bed, but to not see him at all doesn’t happen unlesshe has a business trip.

Even though I’m certain my husband wouldn’t go away without informing me, earlier I called his assistant to check his whereabouts.

Maggie told me he was in the office—she even asked if I wanted to speak to him. The breakdown of our relationship is now so extreme that it’s making me question everything, and it’s wrecking me.

Although I don’t doubt the love we share, my experience of married life hasn’t been the fairytale I imagined as a girl.

I accept some of the responsibility for that by agreeing to marry such a complex character. After all, he even warned me in his proposal that our lives would never be conventional.

I suppose I just hoped eventually he would change, and that I’d become the only woman he ever wanted.

Every other facet of my life isn’t a struggle. I have everything money could buy. We live in a beautiful house, which I’ve remodeled into my perfect home. I don’t work—which I fought vehemently against during pregnancy, but later discovered, being a stay-at-home mum is heaven.

However, my husband’s extracurricular activities have changed recently. They used to be part of a twisted sex game. A game I wrote the rules for; hence, I have nobody else to blame for this mess aside from myself.

As with any game, though, there’s a winner and a loser. For this one, I lost, and it’s killing me that not only do I keep on losing, but my husband has lost too.

Raised in a home with a cheating father, I thought I’d calculated my decision by giving him a free rein in those fucking clubs.

Initially, the scenes he created turned me on.

It was a power trip. I just didn’t expect the novelty to go on for so long.

I’ve always congratulated myself on having an honest husband. Unlike my friend’s husbands, he never hid his one-night stands, and in the elite society we mix in, these affairs seem to be par-for-the-course.

Hearing Spencer describe how some woman or other begged for his attention. How he took them on his terms, while thinking of me, lit a fire inside me.Then,I was secure enough to be certain he was mine.

It turned him on, and I taught myself to feed off his pleasure.

After a night out, Spencer would return home with a spring in his step, reeking of women’s perfume. The contrast between then and now is that; then, each time, the scent was different.

For the last few months, the scent has been the same, and I’ve grown to despise it.

I even know what perfume she wears. It’s Jo Malone’s Pomegranate Noir. I can say this with certainty because I used to wear it myself up until about a year ago.

The drastic shift in my husband’s behavior—his growing absence, the way he barely makes time for our daughter, and how he rarely comes home at night—can only mean one thing; he’s met someone else, and she matters to him.

And that reality scares me senseless.

I’m lost and rudderless.

Snatching up my phone, I call my friend. Nicky is the only person who can ground me when I get like this.

“Hey. I was just thinking about you,” Nicky says in her usual bright, cheerful manner.

“I need you to talk me off the ledge,” I groan.

“Why? What’s he done now?” she demands, with the familiar air of annoyance she adopts when we discuss Spencer.

“He hasn’t been home for three nights,” I choke out.

“And you’re only just calling me?” she snaps, her exasperation clear.