When did you stop loving me?

I’m working this timeline like a crazy person. Trying to figure out when you really left me. I’m wracking my brain to see if I can find evidence of when you started staying out longer and longer. When you disappeared from our normal life. When you removed your tools and your deer head and your saddles.

When you left your garage door opener on the counter, was I supposed to know that meant you were moving out?

If I remember right, you left the garage door opener and your debit card on the island. I don’t remember if you left a note, or if we talked about it before you left, or after you left. In my head, the conversation included some sort of guilt-ridden explanation … “I don’t want you to worry about me taking money from our account, so I’m leaving the debit card. And you should have the “deluxe” garage door opener (yours worked on both doors, where mine only opened mine).”

More suspicious women would have known right away that was a death knell. But I just didn’t think about it. I knew you’d be back. The business stuff was hard, but we were solid. Or so I believed.

Sometimes I wonder if I’d just noticed earlier … followed you to Iowa one night or researched your phone records … could we have avoided all this? I surely could have busted you if I’d tried. All the evidence was on the damn internet. I KNEW about Iowa.

I have pored over our text exchanges. I can’t pick a date when your tone changed. I’m recalling the thousands of phone conversations, and I can’t remember a coolness in your voice or a disassociation. I just can’t figure out when you stopped loving me.

I suppose it’s possible to love two people at once. Perhaps one with nostalgia of what used to be or could have been, and one with the excitement a new relationship brings.

What I can’t get my head around is how long you let the charade continue when you KNEW how I was interpreting the situation. Not only did you leave me with all of the financial and legal mess, all of the work of taking care of the house, all of the covering up with your friends … you allowed and even encouraged me to believe it was going to be OK.

That is torture. That is so mean it’s not even funny.

How could you treat ME like that. Me. The one person you knew, in the very darkest places of your heart, loved you. Who supported you. Who trusted you when she shouldn’t. Who forgave you for the first time and took you back in and raised your daughter and gave you a family and a home.

I was the one that knew all the "bad" stuff and loved you anyway. Wholly and fully. Why was that not good enough? 

I wonder if you started to notice things about me you didn’t like? I wonder about all of those mornings I spent screaming at you on my way to work, trying desperately to get you to tell me the truth about the financial trouble we were in. I knew you were lying to me. I knew you were not telling me the whole truth. But you kept saying that there was nothing more to know. It was all out. You had nothing to lose. And that you wouldn’t treat me like that. Until I found out the next thing … and the cycle would start all over again.

I wonder if you started making comparisons between the old and the new. With me, you get yelling and money issues and pain. With her you get discovery and no baggage and the excitement her lifestyle and paycheck could bring.

Finding the paperwork in your office for the condo payoff dated 10/31/17 just about killed me. Three days before that, you and I took the girls to Rockford for a spooky Halloween escape room. Nothing was off kilter for me then. Two weeks before then, I turned 50. You were “on the road” I think, and I do remember feeling hurt that my landmark birthday was essentially ignored. How in the hell were you signing her name and knowing her social security number and closing a real estate deal for her THEN? Was that your saddle in the bedroom of the SC house? Did you live with her there before her husband’s body was even cold?

I will admit that when we got married, I wasn’t really 100% sure I loved you. I’d never been in love before. Real love. I knew I adored you. I knew I loved the way you loved me. I knew I liked the me I was when I was around you.

But because I wasn’t sure what love was, I wasn’t sure if this was real love.

Over time, I knew I had, in fact, loved you all along.

I couldn’t imagine living my life without you. I couldn’t picture my future without you in it. It sounds cliché, but you and I became “we” and I never considered another option to that.

You, of course, reaffirmed that at every turn. We knew what our forever looked like. We talked about it a lot. Your knees were going to go. My memory was going to go. I’d push you around in your wheelchair and you’d tell me where to turn.

We had plans to travel and explore. We talked about where we wanted to live. We discussed what Kati’s life and Bella’s tomorrow and Olivia’s plans might look like.

You taught me to say “I love you.” You never left the house without saying it and kissing me. Never. That was important to you.

When did that change?

The night I found your photo on Facebook with her, I knew that I did love you … because it hurt so much more than I thought anything could.