There Is Something You Don't Know

Anxiety screams, but intuition is a drum beat.

Sep 24, 2024

A quick note: The dividers in this post (like the one directly beneath this little tidbit) indicate the passage of time.

I woke as I always did, with a sick feeling in my stomach and a longing in my heart. Each morning I’d roll over and grab my phone with a small, secret sense of hope that in the night, a dispatch from the other side had come through—a text or call to prove that he was still out there, perhaps missing me as much as I did him.

It had been four months since he told me it wasn’t going to work. Publicly, I was putting one foot in front of the other, I was moving on, I was keeping my focus on the future; privately, my heart was bleeding out. Our relationship had shown spidery cracks on the surface, but it was as deep as it was flawed. I ached for my best friend, the person I loved deeply, still. I was swimming upstream against agony; it was an unceasing, demanding grief.

I released “do not disturb” mode and scanned my notifications with blurry eyes. The information came in a staccato: A missed call. A missed call? From him? From him.

In a beat, it synthesized: he had called, inexplicably, at 7 o’clock that morning.

It’s happening, I thought, my heart pounding. He’s coming back.

I sat hunched over his laptop in the darkness of my living room. In the time since I started my investigation, the sun had set, and I was too locked in to get up and turn a light on.

I didn’t need it, anyway. Everything I needed was right here in his laptop—or so I’d hoped. I needed to find the thing—the thing that I did not know.

It began almost immediately after we reconciled six weeks ago: a declaration would drop from the sky and into my mind, commanding my attention. In my own words, clear, calm, and concise: there is something you don’t know.

I always say, anxiety screams, but intuition is a steady drum beat. I heard this phrase—there is something you don’t know—rhythmically and repeatedly, within the confines of my mind, for weeks. At first, I thought it was about the woman he dated while we were broken up—the one he had lied about. But I asked, and I pressed, and he was adamant that he had (finally) told me the whole truth and there was nothing left to excavate.

My intuition begged to differ.

I had told him about the restlessness in my chest, that I felt there was something he wasn’t telling me. He resisted, but something within me was unrelenting. My intuition cornered me, and I made a choice.

That choice was to tear through his internet search history while he was out for the evening.

There I sat in the glow of the laptop, scrolling through months’ worth of web searches, hoping my eye would catch on something that I could pin to this unyielding agitation. I convinced myself that if I know the demon, I can banish it.

But there was no demon to be exorcised, as I didn’t find any evidence of a crime. And when I finally came up for air, I felt an immediate sense of dread. I had regressed to the behaviors of the 19-year-old version of myself who was absolutely tortured by a mediocre college boy with a penchant for emotional affairs. I had promised myself I would never go back there—that I wouldn’t even be with someone whose privacy was tempting to violate. The guilt overwhelmed me and I felt physically ill.

I knew I’d have to confess.

An hour later, he returned, coming through the door with a smile on his face that faded as soon as he saw my own expression.

“We need to talk,” I blurted, standing on the knife’s edge. He hadn’t even taken his jacket off, but came over to sit next to me on the couch.

I turned my guilty conscience over and dumped it all out: that I looked through every website he had visited within the last year, and I was horrified with myself, and I was deeply regretful for stooping to that level…but…

…I was also pleading insanity. “I have this persistent feeling there is something you’re not telling me, and it’s killing me.” The tears arrived immediately, and I pulled my knees into my chest. “I feel like I’m losing my mind.” My desperation was palpable.

With that, his face changed, dropping in a way I hadn’t seen before—not even when he broke up with me last spring through childlike sobs.

“I have to tell you something,” he said, his voice coming out low and quiet.

I waited, watching his face, tilted down at his hands clasped in front of him—he wasn’t going to look me in the eyes for this. Even in the dim lighting, I could see that his skin had turned a shade of gray, as though he might throw up instead of speak. But then it came, his voice breaking as he released the words, “I cheated on you.”

In that moment, the room tipped on its side, and my heart slipped away, as I ceased to be the person I had been.

“NO.”

Sam said it with such conviction that the people standing near us at the bar turned their heads, hearing her concern over the band that played behind us.

A beat later, “WHY!”

My regret was immediate—not for taking back the ex who had cheated, but for bringing it up here, and now, when I should have known this is exactly how she’d react. Valid, of course, but there were certain beliefs I had to cling to in order to make this work, and Sam was about to press me on all of them.

The infidelity had decimated me, and my closest friends and family, including Sam, were the ones who helped me pick up the pieces. It had been a disorienting, out of body experience. But for months, he didn’t let up. He kept calling, kept apologizing. And I’m not sure what psychological disorder is at play here, but there is a dark sense of satisfaction when the person who hurt you the most is pleading for you to forgive them.

The cheating had been an excruciating rejection, and that pleading took the edge off.

But over time, it turned to discussions on what it would look like if we got back together.

The reconciliation had been carried out quietly, and we had agreed not to tell anyone yet, but I’ve never been able to keep things from Sam. It had also occurred to me that healthy relationships probably don’t often start in secret.

We squabbled about it for a few minutes and she ended it bluntly: “Well, hoping for the best, but he doesn’t deserve another chance.”

I watched Sam disappear back into the crowd and held her words for a moment. When I look back on this, will I be satisfied, because she was wrong? Or ache, because she was right?

I felt a flicker in my gut, but I winced it away, and rejoined my friends.

My heart was pounding so vigorously that I could feel the mattress shaking. I was lying still, but my whole body was vibrating from within. It was just after 5 a.m. when I awoke by chance and checked my phone, expecting a goodnight voicemail from my partner, who was in Las Vegas for a bachelor trip.

It was all I had asked for—just a message at the end of the night to let me know he was safe in his room. But my screen was blank. No call, no text, nothing. I went from half asleep to fully panicked in one second flat.

As my brain set fire, I stumbled to assemble a rationalization, but all I could hear was: it shouldn’t be this way. I couldn’t ignore it. Two years in. Two full years after the mightiest promises were made to be honest and reliable and faithful, and I was still begging for scraps.

In other relationships, you have access to the benefit of the doubt. In other relationships, you can assume a simple mistake was made. In other relationships, you don’t have a list of similar incidents the length of a CVS receipt.

I suppose I had been waiting for my summit moment—after the long and arduous climb of Mount Forgiveness, we would reach the peak, privileged to look back on all the difficulties we had traversed. I would finally get my gold star, my pat on the back, and the most elusive prize of all: a sense of peace.

But in the dark before dawn, as I wondered where he was lingering in the Vegas night, I understood: that crowning moment is never coming.

I am climbing the mountain alone.

Tomorrow would be the end.

He was set to move the rest of his stuff out, and that would be the final nail in the coffin. We had floated on hope for three years—at first it was naïve, but over time, it became blind. There was nothing left, no more chances, no turning back. It would be definitive, a period at the end of a sentence with an unruly amount of semicolons.

I have never fought for anything the way I fought to forgive the infidelity. I read books, listened to podcasts, wrote in questions to experts, worked with my therapist, and in the end, he told me it hadn’t been enough. In the end, the trust he believed he deserved had not arrived soon enough; he didn’t want my forgiveness anymore. He just wanted to leave.

At first, as my heart was breaking, there was a natural impulse to triage the wound—could it be saved? But I caught myself almost immediately. It came in with that same clear, concise, calmness: let him go. And this time, I yielded.

I gripped this feeling in the center of my chest as I prepared to spend the night at my friends’ house, so he could make his final exit in private. I was moving with efficiency when I had to get a bag from a closet—his closet—and the sight of his shirts stopped me in my tracks. I stared at the row of colors and patterns, knowing that in just a few hours, this would be a blank space.

I let myself fall forward, leaning into the soft cushion of flannel and cotton, pressing my face into the familiar smell. I inhaled deeply, knowing I’d never let myself get this close again.

There Is Something You Don't Know

Anxiety screams, but intuition is a drum beat.

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