My husband was always traveling for work, and to support him, I wanted to remind him of the love waiting at home. So I packed his favorite meal and showed up at his hotel room unannounced. Sadly, I was the one in for a surprise.
When I stood at the altar over 10 years ago, wearing my mother’s veil and the softest smile I’d ever worn, I promised Ethan forever. And for a while, I meant it with everything I had, until I discovered the truth about my husband in a hotel room. When Ethan and I married, we were just kids back then.
We were 25, broke, and dumb enough to think love alone could stretch across time zones and child care schedules. Then life got loud. We’ve since welcomed four kids, experienced job promotions, continuous business trips, and a growing gap between who we are and who we used to be.
But through it all, I never wavered. I believed we were worth the effort, and felt the same about Ethan. Why wouldn’t I?
Bringing up so many children meant surviving sleepless nights when colic ruled our world, missing birthdays, and more. At home, I handled the morning chaos like a general, wrangling our children through school mornings that felt like small-scale battle zones. I dealt with flying ponytails, spilled cereal, unzipped backpacks, and tackled mountains of laundry that seemed to multiply when I turned my back.
At night, I tucked the little ones in bed while Ethan joined late conference calls from different hotel rooms. I loved him in all the quiet ways: leaving coffee on the bathroom counter when he woke late, and texting him photos of the kids at school plays he could not attend. Through it all, he’s been my partner in every sense.
He’s been loving, attentive, and the type of man who would read bedtime stories even after long days. My husband would go out of his way to rub my shoulders when he saw the exhaustion in my eyes, and he made me feel like I was never carrying the weight alone. But the main downside, as you might have picked up, was his work.
He travels constantly—sometimes weeks at a time—always saying it’s for “business.”
But when he’s gone, he still calls every night, checks in on the kids, and asks about my day. He told me he was doing it for us, grinding through endless flights and meetings so we could afford the life we dreamed of. I never had a reason to doubt him.
If anything, I felt guilty that he was working so hard while I got the gift of being home with our little ones, those fleeting, golden days that slipped through my fingers even as I held them. But love doesn’t unravel all at once; it loosens in threads so fine you hardly notice until the fabric thins. Somewhere along the way, I started to feel him drifting.
I thought maybe he was tired. Perhaps we both were. Then I started noticing more things…
little cracks in the story he told me, shadows where there should have been light. I noticed the pauses in his voice when I told him how the kids were driving me nuts. The way his bank charges didn’t quite match the itinerary he’d given me.
How he no longer asked if I missed him. Maybe he already knew the answer. So when he left for another week-long trip, I decided to do something different.
The story doesn’t end here — it continues on the next page.
Tap READ MORE to discover the rest 🔎👇
