Lisa, caverna et al:

Something I want to add on those notes, to serve possibly as a warning more than anything else:

I know I've mentioned this before, but it's worth it to do it again: OW contacted my H (I'm thinking just a couple months before he left me) for him to design and build something for a room she was designing. He was usually with me when he would call her. She came to my house for their initial meeting, and then he met up with her and several other interior designers/decorative painters one evening shortly thereafter. He was so happy because these folks were going to be his "connection" that helped launch his business.

Here's the interesting twist: His cell phone records show that he had very sporadic calls to her, late in the evenings (when he was home), from the time they met until early September. Those are the phone calls I knew about. H was *always* with me in the evenings. Never worked late. Never went out with the guys. Always even came home for lunch.

I found out I was preggo on Aug. 31 but had kinda known since mid-August.

In early September (days after my pregnancy was confirmed), H's phone calls to/from OW started happening more frequently, and always during work hours -- including the 40-minute conversation. The first conversation he had with her outside of work hours was the night he left me. He had two conversations with her that night, each about 25 minutes in length.

So what's the moral of the story? There are *truly* sometimes when an A can be going on right under your nose, and there's nothing -- and I mean *nothing* -- that's pointing to it. That is soooo freakin' scary.

I beat myself up for a while about being so blind. But the fact is that I wasn't blind. I trusted my H. He had never given me a reason not to. And an A can start without an EA. Or an EA can start in a 40-minute phone call, and blow up into a PA within a matter of days.

Trying to "catch" the PA before it happens is nearly impossible -- especially if you're trusting and therefore don't snoop through your S's cell phone -- or whatever other devices s/he's gonna use to pull it off.

Anyway, that's a lesson learned, for what it's worth.