Kate,
I love you, I always will, and I love our children more than life itself. I’ve struggled for a long time trying to make this work, to feel as happy as I should with our perfect life, our perfect house and our perfect family, but I just don’t have the strength anymore. You deserve better, so do the girls.
I met someone else, I don’t know how it happened, I wasn’t looking for it but it came and I couldn’t resist. I’m sorry, I know I’m weak. But I also know that I feel happier and lighter than I’ve felt in years. I feel free. I know you won’t understand this right now but I hope that you will, in time, and that you will find the same freedom.
I’m going away for a while, to give us both a chance to clear our heads, for the dust to settle. I know you’ll be angry with me and it’s more than I deserve but please tell the girls that I’m on a business trip. I want to be a good dad to them, I need to be. But to do that we both need some time so that we can reset and start again.
I’ll be in touch in a few weeks. I love you. I’m sorry.
Kate stared at the letter for so long that the words started to blur and bounce around on the page in front of her. Her heart was pounding as her mind whirred through possible alternatives – this wasn’t actually happening; she was dreaming; it would all be fine in the morning – before landing on the inevitable truth. This was very real and the life that she knew had changed forever. But she simply wasn’t prepared.
She had been with Pete for so long that she couldn’t really remember life without him. University sweethearts, she had met him in a student bar in Leeds on her first night in the city. She was high on nerves, cheap beer and the excitement of being away from home for the first time. The bar was heaving with over-eager freshers, necking lagers or alcopops as they made conversation and sized up potential new friends, future housemates and soulmates. After an exhausting day of travelling from her family home in Southampton, finding her new digs, unpacking and meeting new faces, she’d been desperate for a seat and as soon as she spotted one at the end of a table that looked free she’d launched herself at it, grinning self-consciously at the other inhabitants at the table who were all staring back at her. It was quickly established that the seat was already taken and when its tenant, Pete, returned from the bar to claim it, he suggested they solve the problem by her sitting on his lap.
It wasn’t love at first sight but it wasn’t far off either. He was living in the same halls of residence as her and they struck up an easy friendship, meeting in the canteen for meals and walking to campus together where they would go their separate ways for lectures – him in business management and her in communication and media. Soon they were spending several evenings a week lying on her bed together, listening to indie music (his choice), eating crisps and discussing the meaning of life. They were the very cliché of new students but she loved it. By the time she went home for Christmas, she was smitten with this new boy in her life, with his confidence, easy self-assurance and banter, and she spent the entire festive period mooning over him, listening to Mariah Carey (her choice) and using every ounce of willpower that she had not to drunk call him and declare undying love.
Meeting up with her old school friends in the local pub, she’d felt different, as though she’d somehow become a new person in those three months she’d been away, and she was aching to get back to Leeds. The holidays seemed like they would never end and as soon as term started, she was throwing her stuff into her holdall, waving at her parents and practically sprinting to the train station to make her journey back north.
To her amazement and utter joy, Pete returned in January single after breaking up with his girlfriend from back home. As soon as he heard she was back in town he was at her door with some Doritos, a four-pack of beer and a nervous grin. Within two weeks they were an official couple. By the following year their relationship was as solid, reliable and familiar to all their friends as the second-hand furniture that furnished their student digs.
The perfect couple, that’s what they’d been called by the other students during their time in Leeds. They were sociable and fun-loving, always up for a laugh and popular with everyone. They bickered of course but while other couples would have drunken, jealous spats after nights out, accusing the other of flirting with another student from their course, they seemed immune to the drama. With Pete she felt both safe and exhilarated at the same time because everything with him was more fun, more colourful, than her dull, suburban life had been before she met him.
By the time they graduated, they’d made their plan for the future and agreed that they would both apply for jobs in London and move there as soon as they were hired. Their reputation as the dream couple followed them to London where they survived the tumultuous post-university years when all the
