Before I Find You

Cheating is the great leveller. It brings all who suffer from it – rich or poor, the beautiful or the ugly – to the same place. It makes us small, bitter shadows of ourselves, of what we thought we could be. That’s the problem with love, it raises you up, like a Mississippi preacher, and it casts you low, lower than you ever thought you could fall. And it leaves you with nothing to cling to when you’ve got there. I know, I’ve been there. As I watched Helene dab at her eyes with my tissues I thought about my chance encounter with Danny and how he had set me on the path to hearing the most intimate secrets of rich, cuckolded wives.

Young girls think life is a train ride that stops at the following stations: Love, Sex, Marriage. But the final destination is Happiness, where the engine is uncoupled and you idle away your life, never wanting or needing to leave. I was that young girl once, I dreamed that if I was very good and obedient my life would take that journey. But my train has been driven straight off a cliff. I have been destroyed. My entire life was fiction. He killed himself when we had decades longer together. He abandoned Alice when she was only eighteen. 

I didn’t know what I was looking for, I was terrified of what I might find. I was a coward, hiring Maggie Malone to do my dirty work for me. I thought I was a woman who acted, who stood up for herself, who trod her own path, however you want to express it, but that was before I fell in love. Love changed everything. I was very scared about whether I could live without him.

We leave behind only the things we build and the families we create,’ Poppa once said to me. But Poppa wasn’t always right. The victors tell the stories. Now I get to tell my tale my way. 

Doubt is a disease and once it’s taken hold in your tissues, in your heart, nothing can stop it mutating and expanding until it destroys everything you know and love. Everything.