Evidence of the Affair

by Taylor Jenkins Reid

Lastly, I realize I have appeared out of thin air with nothing to offer but bad news, but it must be said that my heart goes out to you, David. Even though I do not know you.

Why did I do that? Why didn’t I confront her? I’m not quite sure. But I take some solace in knowing that you are doing the same thing. How do you hold it inside and not let it show on your face?

You are not crazy, and you are not mistaken, and you are, at this point, perhaps the only person telling me the truth.

I’m sorry for what you are going through. You are correct when you say that we don’t know each other, but right now it feels like you’re the only one who understands. Yours truly,

To be honest, that is part of what I have always loved about him. He was a safe choice. What you see is what you get with Ken, or so I thought. He is methodical and logical and conscientious. I mean, we are talking about a dermatologist who eats a turkey sandwich for lunch every day and only listens to old Simon & Garfunkel and Mick Riva albums. I once put on a David Bowie record, and he said it sounded like “screeching cats crying for more drugs.” My point is that it is absurd to think that Ken was writing a screenplay.

Similar to Mark's character in Maybe In Another Life- also parallels w infidelity

It was just easier to consider the possibility that he’d changed his entire personality overnight than it was to believe that he would cheat.

For curiosity’s sake, I’m almost happy when I find one. I always want more information. And yet I’m always miserable after I’ve read them. I seem to be a glutton for punishment.

Instead, I go about my day—to the supermarket, to the salon, to bridge night, to dinner parties—as if nothing is happening. You asked how I hide it all. I don’t know. I guess I find it pretty easy to look like nothing is happening when everything has changed.

I’m hoping it for the both of us with my whole heart.

as if we were planning some long-term clandestine affair!

Ilicit affairs by taylor swift

You are the first thing I think of when I wake up and the last thought I have as I go to bed. I find it difficult to even kiss my husband now. The other day, he came toward me and I shuddered, accidentally. It’s not that I don’t care for him, but he is not where my heart is. You hold my heart, Ken. You own my body.

P.S. I heard Simon & Garfunkel the other day at the bank and thought of you dancing in your bathrobe. I started laughing right there in line. My kids thought I was nuts. You make me a little crazy, I think.

You are only for me. It is as if I have lived with a hard shell all over my body and you have cracked it and it has all fallen off. I am fresh again.

I feel unending fury at the idea of her sharing what she has shared with your husband. When I think of the two of them in a hotel room together, it burns inside me so hard that I think I might collapse.

I guess that’s my own secret, isn’t it? I’m not quite the man I pretend to be, and she’s certainly not the woman I thought she was.

Tell me how you live with it, how you make the days go by. I cannot make it through this alone. I don’t think I’ll be able to survive.

I’m sorry I wrote to you so desperately.

And I find great comfort in your letters. You can consider this a two-way street.

I am afraid of losing all that I have ever known.

We are not alone. We at least know of each other. It is a very lame consolation prize, but I will take it if you will.

How is it that she is capable of being two people at once? It pains me to think of what else she is capable of.

Do you ever feel like your life got away from you somehow? Lately, it feels like my whole life has a similar feeling to when you check the clock on a Saturday and realize it’s already half past four. I just don’t understand how I got here.

This just isn’t how it was all supposed to go.

I am afraid that my husband is going to leave me for your wife and that I will be left with nothing. Thirty and single and childless without even so much as a secretary position on my résumé. I’ll be a joke. I don’t have anything of my own, anything to show for my time. All I’ve ever done is marry a doctor. Often, I feel overwhelmed by this sinking feeling in my heart that I will never be enough. That I am damaged and any man in his right mind would leave me. What man wants a woman who cannot bear him a child?

The doctor can’t say for sure why I am not yet pregnant, but it seems clear that something is wrong with me. He even said it was likely pointless to test Ken. He said it most often lies with the woman. What more evidence do I need that I’m deficient?

She must be so womanly, so beautiful, so perfect. I imagine that my husband looks at your wife and sees a real woman. And I am afraid that I will lose the life I have built to a woman who can give him what he wants.

You must know we could never be a one-time thing. We are once-in-a-lifetime paramours.

I miss you with all my heart. And when I think I cannot bear it anymore, I think of how it feels to lift you into bed and know that you exist only for me. That I exist only for you. I have never loved before. If this is what love is.

But then April came around, and the sun came out and the leaves started sprouting and life began again. It seemed like the most exquisite thing in the world.

“I have never loved before. If this is what love is.” I cannot believe he wrote that to her. Days later, I still hear it reverberating in my head over and over and over. I have never felt so alone. Alone in the world and alone in my marriage. Alone in love, really. With a man who claims he never loved me.

I am not alone at the party. You are at this miserable party with me. And it brings a smile to my face to be standing next to you.

You are the very definition of a breath of fresh air.

Delights can be hard to come by recently, so I truly cherish getting to laugh with you.

It seems as if you see me exactly as I wish to be seen. There is no greater gift than that.

You lack nothing, regardless of what roadblocks you have hit in your life, no matter what things in life don’t come easy to you. You lack nothing at all. I hope you see that. You are everything a man could want in a woman.

Thank you for helping me hold my head a bit higher at a time in which it has every reason to hang low.

I still can’t believe just how many ways in which you have enlightened my life.

You are a revelation. And beside you, I could feel nothing but peace.

The only silver lining, should all this end in disaster, is that there is you.

It was as if the past had never transpired.

admit that it is true that there were women before you, and if you and I truly are over, then I have no reason to become monogamous.