Three months ago I found out my husband had another woman in his life. His phone was on the table when Uncle Richard sent a text that said, “When are we going to have a repeat of last night? Let’s do it very soon. I love you.”

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Uncle Richard is his mother’s elder brother who is abroad. So that night, I picked up his phone and went through the messages between him and ‘Uncle Richard.’ She’s actually Susan, a mother of one who owns a very big shop in town and is doing very well in life. From their messages, my husband is always the one saying thank you because Susan is always giving him something to be grateful for.

Usually, such messages would break a wife’s heart and make her cry all night, but I didn’t. It wasn’t the first time I’d come across such things. And that wasn’t even the reason I didn’t get angry or cry. I realized the lady was also a victim. She doesn’t know my husband is married and has two children.

My husband sold her a story that said he was a victim of bad relationships, the reason why he wasn’t married at his age. He said he dated a woman for three years and was close to marrying her, but the lady got pregnant by another man who had money. Susan was empathetic. She said, “That’s how evil women treat good men and they become bad men in their next relationship.”

Susan has a good heart. Every night, I would pick up my husband’s phone and read their messages because of Susan. She has a beautiful name for my husband. She calls him ‘Night Owl.’ I don’t know how that name came about, but it looks like there’s a beautiful story behind it because my husband sends heart emojis whenever she calls him that.

She will send him pictures of her day. She would go to a shop, take a photo of an item and send it to my husband and say, “I found this. I think you’ll love it.” Those items end up in our house with a different story. He would either say he bought it on sale or a friend from abroad gave it to him. Susan would take a photo of herself coming from church and say, “I prayed for you. This week you’ll win big.”

Their conversations are never sexual. It shows how respectful and mature Susan is. When they talk about sex, it’s with dignity, framed in white cloth. One night Susan sent a text asking my husband if he had plans to travel outside the country. He responded, “Hell yes!” Susan said, “We can plan it.”

I asked myself, “What did this man do right to have a woman like Susan? What did he tell her to make her a believer?”

It breaks my heart anytime I think of the future of their relationship. It breaks my heart for Susan because I’ve come to love her and believe she deserves something better than my husband. She deserves a husband who will come home holding flowers in his left hand and the truth in his right hand. But there she is, grasping the lies my husband is dishing out with both hands.

I want to rescue her, but before I do that, I’ll have to rescue myself first. Our second son is only eleven months old. He needs extra care and not chaos. I’m also close to finding a new job outside where we currently reside. Once the job comes, I’ll leave town with the kids and later initiate divorce.

As things stand currently, if I tell him I know what is going on, he would break down and apologize. He would bring my parents into the issue and find a way to win them to his side. My parents would then tell me, ‘Forgive him for the sake of the children.”

That’s what happened the first time. So when it happened again the second time, I didn’t have the desire to bring my parents into the issue. I resolved it with him calmly. He promised it was the last time something of that nature was going to happen. When he had to do it again, he used the name of his uncle to mask out the truth.

“Does Susan know her name is saved as Uncle Richard on my husband’s phone?” I ask myself and laugh.

She doesn’t know. A woman this loving and thoughtful deserves not half a man like my husband. She is hardworking and has earned a living being the woman she is. You might ask why she’s not doing enough to know the background of my husband and ultimately catch him, but you know, a woman in love is a different being. No matter how intelligent and smart a woman is, deep love, I mean the kind of love that makes you wobble at the knee, will cloud a woman’s mind. Maybe she needs love. Maybe she needs a man her son will call daddy. Maybe she needs a home that has the fragrance of a patriarch, so she fell for my husband thinking he was the one. I won’t blame her. I’ve been there before. The fact that I’m still living with a cheat like my husband makes me lack the right to criticize her.

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What hurts me the most is the fact that I’m going to be the one to break her heart and not my husband. I will one day call her phone and tell her, “You’re dating my husband.” She would say I’m lying. I would prove myself, and she would burst out crying with pieces of herself on the floor. I hope when that day comes, I can give her a shoulder to cry on, and she will trust me enough to give me hers too, because we are both victims of a man’s brutal assault of the heart.

—Audrey

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