Ok, tell me, in your own time Gin

“Mike you hate me now, don't you? I know you hate me! I can feel your pain! I should've never gone down this road.”

“Ginia will you just..”

“NO! I know better than this! I should of kept my big mouth..”

“VIRGINIA WILL YOU please shut the fuck up.”

“SSSssshhhhhhh!!” Angry faces for miles.

“Sorry people, my apologies!”

“Gin, first off who starts a sentence with 'Well it begun to come apart long before my affair..' for FUCKS SAKE!! REALLY!... You caught me completely off guard. And while you're at it if there is anymore earth shattering news could you see your way free to tell me NOW! That way I can combine any heart attack I'm overdue for now in one go!”

“M, I'm sorry.”

“SECONDLY!” God, the library Stasi were giving us the evil eye. “Secondly, have you forgotten its me you're talking too, remember our talk about how and why I trust you implicitly yesterday Gin? Do you? I know damn well that if you had an affair there was more to it than you wanting a roll in the hay, and don't you dare tell me I'm wrong.”

She silently looked down at the table and started to cry. I stopped and walked over to her and gathered her in my arms, “Come on honey, we're fine okay and I have not lost my faith in you, never. When your ready we'll start again.”

“I'd always known that Rob was pretty insecure with our relationship at the start, he could never understand why we had to wait with doing anything until I'd talked to you about where we were going or what you wanted to do, I knew you didn't feel you could provide for us at the time but if you had said you wanted to try I would of in a minute. Even after You and I parted Rob always saw himself as being second best, which wasn't true I just could not allow myself to have unanswered question's hanging over my head. I felt sure that Rob would eventually understand that he wasn't second best, but as it turned out he never did. He completely shattered me when he listed it as the only reason he would want a divorce if he were looking for one, I mean it didn't count but he knew it would hurt me like it always did every time he brought it up.

We were doing so well, we had Paul and were thinking of having more kids, I wanted three and he said he was on board, he never said otherwise but no matter how we tried I wasn't able to get pregnant again. In desperation I went to get tested to see if there was a problem with me, there wasn't but when I suggested that he get tested he hit the roof, so in the end it became a subject that we both steered away from.

By year twelve I knew that we weren't going to have any more kids, and I still couldn't understand why. As it turned out Rob had a vasectomy straight after I'd given birth with Paul. I was heartbroken I so wanted more kids, but I knew that wasn't going to happen.

He had a lot of married friends when we got married, he was the last of his group to get married and I liked most of them, but three of the couples were stand-offish when it came to us, well me actually, the rest of us had nicknamed the group 'the snoots'. It was year fourteen that one of the couples Mal and Toni, good folks, Toni became my best friend. Anyway they had been out at a function at one of the upscale restaurants in the city when they saw who they thought was Rob, with Carly one of the snoots wives and her husband Dan was with a young Asian women. They were in a group of about thirty couples. Well Mal did some snooping and found out they were all members of a swinging group that hired out the banquet room every three or so months.

When I confronted Rob he never shied away or lied, he was quite up about it and he told me then that he'd been part of the group from before we were married, in a large group of married couples he was the only single man in the club, they all thought it was a joke that they'd kept me out of the loop and each month one of the husbands got the use of a female from outside the group, she was Rob's defacto partner for the night. He had a vasectomy because the whole group refused to wear condoms and none of the males wanted the embarrassment of getting someone elses wife pregnant. After he had told me all this I went into a deep depression which lasted a year and a half, it completely destroyed my confidence and at various stages on the way back I'd look at suicide as my only way out of the nightmare. I still find myself at night or when I'm alone crying over the babies I was never able to have and the love that slipped away from me that would of given me that.

During that time Paul spent times in the care of my Mum and Dad or Rob's parent's. Rob's parents still aren't talking to him, and both sets of parents have been to either counselling, grief or anger management. My Dad, Mike, you just don't want to know.” She slowly shook her head and I found it hard to believe her that her Dad had anger management problems, he just wasn't that type of man.

“The divorce took just over a year to sort through, Rob put roadblocks up the whole way. he said I was trying to prevent access to Paul, I had forbidden him to have sex with me for ten years, on and on. It took sworn affidavit's from multitudes of our friends before it was all sorted. He tried everything to stop the divorce, swearing he would change, I'm the only woman around that has actively refused reconciliation counselling probably in the history of the court system,” Thankfully we both chuckled at that, if it did anything it released some of the tension, I never realised til I laughed that the whole time Gin was talking I had clamped my jaw so tight that my teeth hurt and my jaw ached like I'd taken a blow to it. “Do you know the last time I saw Rob, was outside of the court, he had the gall to come over and tell me that he was glad he had done all that he did behind my back because it meant he could get out from behind your shadow that I'd caged him up to.”

“He FUCKING said Fucking THAT, to you Virginia, I'll fucking kill the cunt!”

“I'm sorry but I'm going to have to ask you two to please leave, you are both upsetting some of the other library users.”

Damn we'll have to find another library to swear in, luckily I had an office and it would have to do.