After 18 years, I finally have the details about the girl my husband cheated with.

It’s been a quite day, quite a week, quite a month—whatever. If you’ve been following my recent blogs, you probably noticed something’s been off with me. I’ve been this way for a mix of good and bad reasons.

Let’s start with the good. Like clockwork, at around the eight-week mark after all three of my pregnancies, I get horny. I mean the kind of horny where it feels like my body finally belongs to me again and I’m ready to ride a fence post. When this hits, I devour anything sexual—videos, audios, literature—you name it. That’s probably why I loved the baseball player story AI wrote for me in one of my last blogs. It was steamy, raw, fun—basically, it was just sex.

Right now, I’m playing a mental game of “smash or pass” with every adult I see, whether they’re in person, on TV, or online. So far, no passes, I’m that worked up. And I know I’m not alone—my poor sister Jess got so intense four weeks postpartum that she got pregnant again right away. That’s how we ended up with our adorable Irish twin additions to our family. She smartly made her husband get a vasectomy while she was pregnant with twin #2.

So yeah, everything is turning me on. Bubs and I got into a huge fight on Tuesday over my nemesis Chloe. Somehow, I made the poor guy have sex with me while I yelled at him. It was incredible—for me, at least.

Now, the bad. I’m exhausted. Ashley’s been cluster feeding like crazy, and I haven’t really slept in days. During the day, she’s okay, but at night, she just wants to nuzzle my boob while I’m sitting up, latching every five minutes or every hour, depending on her mood. If she doesn’t get her way, she screams like a banshee. We’ve got an appointment with her pediatrician next week to see what we can do.

The other bad is that the one-year anniversary of Mexico/Reddit is looming, and it’s causing me a ton of anxiety. My therapists always say don’t schedule two appointments in one day. But with kids, a working husband, provider schedules, and the pressure of this anniversary, I somehow ended up with couples counseling and a sexual assault recovery specialist appointment on the same day—today.

We just finished the couples counseling session, and it was so intense I got a “doctor’s note” from one therapist to the other, saying I shouldn’t do two sessions in one day—and as a professional courtesy a request to waive the 24-hour cancellation policy for me.

We hadn’t seen Lydia in quite some time. I think Bubs and I both expected a quick check-in. But Lydia had read my recent blogs and noticed a big change in my tone. She was especially concerned about how I talked to Bubs in the comments of Tuesday’s blog. I tried to brush it off as normal banter, but Lydia asked Bubs if it felt like banter to him. He said no, it sounded hurt and angry.

I don’t even remember how we went from Chloe and  the overly sexualized blogs posts to talking about Bubs cheating on me back in high school—but we did. Lydia reminded us that we’ve touched on it before, but obviously, it still hurts. Maybe because of everything I’m going through and my horniness turning me into some kind of voyeur chasing pain, I blurted out the one secret we still keep from each other: I know nothing about the girl he cheated with, except that she was 17 and a gymnast at an overnight camp that shared dorms with his baseball camp. I’ve asked before, but he’s always deftly avoided the conversation.

Lydia asked me what good knowing the details would do. I said I didn’t know—I just felt like, after all the pain he caused me, I deserved to know. She asked if it was some kind of sexual thing relating to my post partum horniness , like I wanted to mix pain and pleasure into a memory file. One thing I love about Lydia is she doesn’t mess around—she gets right to the point.

She asked Bubs what he thought. He said the past is the past. It’s been 18 years, and his memories are vague anyway.

Then Lydia gave us a long lecture about how our opposing viewpoints are why Bubs and I are so compatible in some ways but clash in others. She believes we’re a great counterbalance, but sometimes we forget to be on the same team. I agreed. Her analogy was pretty cute--a screw and a nut work to hold things together but if the screw isn't inserted into the nut, nothing gets held together. I got the message but salivated at the words screw and insert.

She asked me again: what good would it do to know about the girl and how it came to pass? Again, I said he put me through a year of hell because he stuck his dick in someone else. He cost us losing our virginity together, gave me so much self-doubt that still lingers, and every time he goes out of town, I can’t say he’ll never cheat, because he has.

She asked Bubs how he felt about that. He said it was the most shameful decision of his life, even though he was only 15, and he’ll carry that shame forever. He hates that it still hurts me.

She asked what I wanted to do. I said I wanted to know the details. I can fight with him over Chloe and her clique because she’s a known quantity. But this mystery gymnast? I’m still in the dark and at an unfair disadvantage. 

So he agreed. I probably made a smart move moving to my own room and using my own MacBook, because there were sharp objects on his desk... but I sat there, enraptured, when he rattled off the story.

He thinks her name was Amanda, but isn’t sure. She was a little taller than me, with much darker hair and very light skin. She knew he had a girlfriend and told him she had a boyfriend in Scottsdale—which he now realizes was stupid because the camp was at ASU, just ten minutes away. They met in the dining hall, both annoyed by how loud it was. She’d been to the camp before and knew how to sneak in and out of the dorms. She kissed him and asked if he had protection. At first, he didn’t know what she meant. The first night ended with him walking back to his dorm very confused and he actually called that night, masking his shame with home sickness. I remember that call like it was yesterday. 

He remembered all the guys at baseball camp thinking he was both a hero—because a 17-year-old kissed him—and an idiot—because he didn’t know that “protection” meant condoms. He had no idea how to get any, so he hoped that possibly she'd find someone who could. But the next night she brought him into her room, had condoms ready to go and they did the deed.

He said it was fun, but he felt immense shame and guilt because he knew he had to break up with me. That didn’t stop him from sneaking to her room every night of camp. It was a combination of the sex and the fact that the other guys—and even some coaches—thought he was the coolest person alive for actually getting laid.

He came home and broke up with me in his parents’ driveway because he thought that was the right thing to do.

So that’s been 18 years, and I knew none of this—not one iota. I don’t know how I feel about knowing now. Part of me is relieved to put some details to a painful chapter. Part of me wants to know more—like cyberstalk Amanda. What does she look like now? Is she happy? Would we get along? She and I are the only two women he’s ever had sex with, after all. And my junior self is dying to know if she was better at gymnastics than me. Because somehow, if she was only a level 7, I win. If she was a solid level 10 or elite, then Bubs objectively picked the wrong girl.

I cried through the entire session after that. Lydia gave us advice on how to get through the rest of the day and strongly recommended I cancel my second therapy appointment—it was a lot. She asked Bubs how he felt, and he said he still carries so much shame and that the reveal was neither good nor bad.

When we hung up, thank God Ashley was asleep because I made Bubs crawl into bed with me and press our foreheads together while he wrapped his arms around me. I think he expected me to yell, but I just cried. He was very sweet. It’s still confusing how this amazing man could hurt me like that. Yes, we were young, but we were still the same people.

I guess I don’t have an answer yet. But I know so much more than I did yesterday.

And no matter what we cleared up today, I’m still painfully horny, still exhausted, and that anniversary is coming up.