Agonize over your options

How could you have been so stupid? You should have thrown all that stuff out before you left for the negotiations and you should have been much more careful with your digital foot print. You never wanted to burden Alice with this side of you.

Tears well up in your eyes, this was supposed to have been your triumphant return home after years of hard work. Now you were alone in an empty house while your wife told your embarrassing secret to her friends. How would you ever look them in the eyes again?

You walked over to the cupboard where you kept the liquor and poured yourself a good helping of whiskey. You swallow it all in one gulp, the burn down your throat feels right and knocks you out of the stupor you had been in since Alice showed you her discovery. You pour a second glass to sip on and carry it down to the basement where your home office is set up. There are boxes of lab equipment and samples strewn about the floor, their presence taking on a new meaning now that you know what your wife thought you might do with them. You sat down heavily on the couch that would be your bed for the foreseeable future if you chose to stay.

Why should you stay? Even after splitting the fortune with Alice you'd be a multi-billionaire. You could move across the country, or to an entirely different country and not worry about what some woman thinks about you.

This wasn't just some woman though, this was the person you had stood across from at the altar and promised to love in sickness and in health till **** do you part. And you had meant it. She was your first and only real love. She was every bit your intellectual equal and the only person you had ever felt comfortable really opening up to. In the countless hours you'd spent together your connection had grown stronger, when you found something that excited you the first thing you wanted to do was share it with her. You knew this closeness had only made your betrayal of her cut deeper. Leaving her would leave you feeling like half a person. Could you bear to be without her?

And then there was the little devil inside that you had spent so much of your life denying, succumbing to, purging and resisting. The part of you that responded to your wife's suggestion with elation. How could you have hoped for anything better than this? She didn't immediately throw you out, didn't curse your name and declare you dead to her. She in fact had the perfect response, the one this part of you had always dreamed of, she was willing to support your fantasy. Wasn't the fear of losing her one of the biggest reasons you had for suppression? What was impossible yesterday was suddenly very achievable.

Still you were afraid. You had a good, enviable life. Your sex life wasn't great as Alice had noted but you had been able to convince yourself that that was just a minor detail. You had accolades, love and now more money than you and your cheap tastes could ever hope to spend. Risking this comfortable life to chase a fantasy would be madness. At least it would have been until Alice **** your hand. Now things were going to change one way or the other.