Things were tense when we got home, less between my wife and me than between Travis and his mom. The two of them went out a few days later for a very, very long dinner. When they got home, both had been crying, but the tension had largely gone. 

Later that night, in bed, Allison curled up close to me and whispered. “Thank you so much, Luke. God, thank you. You’re such a good dad, and you’re a damned better husband than I deserve.” She kissed me lovingly. “Whatever… Whatever you ultimately decide, I want you to know that. I’m never going to find a better man than you. I don’t think one exists.” We cuddled together for a while, and I listened as her breathing changed to tiny little snores.

When we dropped Travis off at college later that summer, in many ways, it was a repeat of Julie’s departure. There were the tears, the hugs, the reluctance to leave. When we reached our hotel, there was the frantic, desperate lovemaking to remind ourselves of who we had been and who we wanted to be again. 

But still, still, I couldn’t reciprocate when my wife whispered, “I love you.” It hurt her. But she knew why I couldn’t, knew how deep the pain of her lies had burrowed into my heart, and she did her best to gracefully accept my recalcitrance in regard to those three little words. Hell, she granted me more grace than I probably deserved by that point. 

My actions spoke for me during that time, the little things we do for the people we love: flowers, affectionate touches, small gifts, and the like. She recognized them for what they were, I know, and they seemed to be enough for the moment. 

I just couldn’t say the words, though. My anger at myself for that failure began to eclipse my earlier fury at my wife’s desperate, mad infidelity. I knew she loved me. I knew I loved her. But I didn’t trust myself to say those words and make them stick, make them mean the thing they needed to mean. Not just that I loved her, but that I forgave her.

The next few years yielded many changes. Julie brought a young man home, and we knew, possibly before she did, that he was the one. Travis flourished at school, continuing his transformation into the fine young man I always knew he would be. Megan finally broke out of her shell and blossomed as well; she was going to break some hearts one day. But not too soon, I hoped. She was still Daddy’s little girl, after all.

In my social circle, things changed as well. Isabella and Janine’s children proved quite a handful, but I loved visiting with them. Lila and Trey broke up, but then they got back together and became engaged, marrying in a small, intimate spring wedding. Tom and Mike moved away, each going to separate cities; we always had a fun time when they came back home to visit.

And a change came to Allison as well. The change. Menopause arrived early for her at only forty-eight; she didn’t know if this was normal for the women in her family or not, as she had almost no ties with either her mother’s or father’s relatives. Luckily, it was relatively gentle for her; she got night sweats and hot flashes, but after hormone replacement therapy, even those were mild. Not so mild that she didn’t take to sleeping in the nude, though.

One Saturday morning in the spring, I watched Alli as she slept. Megan would be leaving for college the next year, and she had taken the car earlier to go spend time with friends; I idly hoped that none of them were boyfriends, but I knew that she had her eye on one or two guys at her high school. Still, I wanted to hold onto my illusions for a little while longer.

It was thinking about illusions that did it for me, that finally gave me the strength I had lacked. The strength of my trust, not in Alli, but in myself. The strength of a love that had been ravaged by an old infidelity and a cuckoo’s egg, by her lies and by my blind fury. 

I would never know the truth of what happened in those sixteen years, but I knew what I believed. I knew how hard Allison had tried to win me back, never denying me anything, not even my rage and my venom and my distance, no matter how much they hurt her. She craved touch, affection, and intimacy, but she never pushed for them. Never pushing me to give up my pain, but always willing to do whatever it took to heal it.

I hoped that was true. I hoped she’d be willing to accept what I’d done to heal.

Because I had healed. There was still pain there, still doubt from time to time; scars never fully heal, after all, not at our age. But nothing like when I’d first learned of what Alli had done. I had built a new life for myself, and it no longer centered around her. It did still include her, though. I needed it to include her. I was finally able to admit that I needed her. 

If Allison ever betrayed me again, I’d have to find a way to go on without her, but I truly believed she wouldn’t. There was too much of the real in how she acted for me to believe her devotion and loyalty were illusions. My wife was who she seemed to be, and what she had done before was a product of her depression and her despair. It wasn’t, at her core, who she was. I had to believe that, for both our sakes.

Alli stirred when I kissed her shoulder and nuzzled into her neck. Her hands roamed my back, and her nipples pressed into my chest as we kissed. And when my fingers slipped inside her, they found her wet and ready, as though even in slumber, she’d been waiting for my affections.

She whimpered as my hand withdrew from the cleft between her legs, but moaned loudly as my dick pushed her labia apart and plunged deep inside. Allison’s hips shifted, trying to grant me greater access, moving in time with mine as I took back, finally and for certain, what was mine. Because that was what I was doing: taking my wife back from the exile I’d sentenced her to.

As my naked cock pounded into her greedy pussy, my wife’s eyes glowed with a wicked, joyous delight. Alli’s usual animal sounds were replaced with words of love and wanton need. “I love you, Luke. I love you so much, baby! Give it to me, give me that fucking perfect dick, oh God, honey!” Tears streaked her face. She knew what this meant, what the lack of the rubber barrier that had separated us for so long signified. But I needed to give her more than a mere symbol.

“I love you, Alli.” 

She froze for a moment, eyes wide with wonder, then pulled me down fiercely onto her, crushing herself to me and wrapping her legs around my waist as she desperately cried, “Fuck me, Luke! God, honey, please fuck me!”

I gave her what she begged for, a reclamation of not just my wife but of our love. She came around me, and I couldn’t hold back; it had been so long since I’d been in a woman without protection that I had grown unaccustomed to the sensations. Allison knew I was close, and she lustily whispered a litany of filth into my ear as she came. “Yes, yes baby, so fucking good, you feel so fucking good inside me, yes, please cum! I’m yours, Luke, yours, always yours! Give it to me, honey! Show me I’m still yours, please! Please!”

When my cock began to throb inside her, my wife moaned in orgasmic joy, pussy fluttering around it as pulse after pulse of seed painted her cervix. I kept thrusting away as long as I could, unwilling to let the moment go. And when I was spent and panting atop her, she sobbed with joy; I had forgiven her. The words hadn’t been spoken yet–although they would be soon–but she knew that I had. We would never be again what we had been before, but we would still find our way forward. 

I hoped.

Things weren’t perfect after that, but they were better. In the time since we’d dropped Travis at college, even since the time we’d dropped Julie off, fewer and fewer of our interactions with the rest of the world were playacting. After that passionate Saturday spent in bed, we weren’t play-acting at all. No longer were we two strangers putting up a pretense of happy husband and wife; we finally were what we’d pretended for so long to be.

It made dropping Megan off at college even more bittersweet, that knowledge that we’d spent so much time playing at being a united mother and father to her, instead of the real thing. I hoped that when our daughter visited at breaks, she’d be unable to tell the difference, that we’d done such a good job at pretending that she never knew how close we’d been to divorcing. But it hurt to have wasted so much of my baby girl’s teen years on bitter recriminations and paranoia, even if they turned out to be the only real way through for her mother and me.

When we dropped her off, things were a little different from when we’d brought her brother and sister. For one, she rode with us; Megan went to a different campus than Julie and Travis, a very walkable one. For the other, when we got there, the boy… no, the young man that had taken her to prom was anxiously awaiting her arrival. Alas, my illusions were finally shattered: she clearly couldn’t wait to spend some time alone with him. With a wry smirk for her and a stern stare for him, we obliged.

Allison and I laughed long and loud once we were in the car, a knowing laugh about the mistakes we had made in college. But that was also where we’d met. We reminisced about our early days together on the way home; Megan’s college was much closer than Julie’s and Travis’s, so there was no need to stay overnight. When we reached our home, though, we shared several days that bore a remarkable resemblance to the previous two post-dropoff weekends.

The house became ours. I was afraid that the quiet would draw out some unexamined trauma between us, but the opposite happened. Our re-energized relationship meant experimental and vigorous explorations of each other’s bodies in many and varied places throughout our home. Alli greeted me naked when I came home more than once; I took her on the kitchen counter, the couch, the dining room table, and various other surfaces that would have been impossible–or at least extremely ill-advised–with children still living at home. 

After a few months of absolutely debauched bliss, things returned somewhat to normal, or at least to a new normal. But I knew that this, too, was an illusion. There were things that still needed to be said, and the longer I let it go, the harder it was going to be.

Thus, on a Friday evening, I was waiting at home with a candlelit dinner for my wife. I was not unaware of the irony, but whereas the first time I had done this by way of ambush, now it was to soften the blow of the information I needed to impart.

Alli wasn’t terribly suspicious; candlelit dinners had become part of our new normal over the previous few months. We had thrown ourselves into trying to reconnect, and small, loving surprises were part of that effort. Unlike when I confronted her, I made sure she drank enough to be comfortable, but not soused. She needed to understand what I had done, and, hopefully, forgive me.

My wife smiled at me from our living room couch after I cleared the dishes, a glass of wine in her hand. However, when she saw the look on my face, that glass went onto the coffee table, and she immediately tried to comfort me. It was sweet, but it only made me feel guiltier.

“Alli, I need to… to confess some things to you.”

She cupped my cheek. “No, you don’t, love. Whatever it is… I told you I’d do anything for you. I meant it.”

I took her hand from my cheek and held it in both hands. “Alli, please. When… After I confronted you, those first few years, I did some things that… I need you to know about them. I don’t want us to go into this next part of our life with secrets.”

“Luke, really. You don’t need to tell me. I accept it. I know that what I did hurt you so badly. We’re back together now. That’s all that matters.”

Shaking my head, I said, “No, Alli. It’s not.” I closed my eyes and took a fortifying breath, then looked straight at her and said, “Let’s start with the smaller thing first. For several years, I had a private detective service sporadically follow you, and I had them check into the time between when you cheated with Jake and when I found out.”

“Okay. I understand; I know I broke your trust, and I’m not offended that you wanted reassurance. I get it. And I’m assuming they found nothing since there was nothing to find?”

“Yes. But, like I said, that was the smaller thing. Much smaller.” Another deep breath to push on through. “After I found out, I was… lost, for a while. I couldn’t… I needed to…” None of this dithering or prefacing was going to help. She’d seen me struggle and had lived with the pain she’d caused. Explanations could come afterward. I just needed to– “Alli, I’m not just Cynthia and Alexander’s godfather. I’m their father.”

My wife smiled kindly, then leaned forward to kiss me. “I know, Luke. I’ve known for a while now.”

“What?”

With a chuckle, she said, “Alexander looks just like your old baby pictures, and Cynthia looks so much like Julie at that age that it’s spooky. It’s okay. I understand.”

“And, you’re okay with it?”

“I am now. I… I wasn’t at first. It hurt me very badly.” Allison gave me a wan smile. “But I thought about that. Really sat with it for a long time. About what you had done, and about what I had done to you, and I realized that… that…”

Alli looked up at the ceiling and swallowed before she continued. “When I… spent that night with Jake, I was depressed. Jake was dying, of course, but it was… 

“PPD is something I don’t really think a guy can have a frame of reference for. I don’t mean that in a dismissive way; it’s just that there are things that you’re only ever going to be intellectually able to understand. It can’t happen to you, and no matter how you might sympathize or empathize or try to put yourself in my shoes, you’re just not going to really understand it. 

“You’ll never carry a life inside you for nine months; sacrifice your health and your body for it. Never worry constantly about this little mass of cells that are turning into a tiny person, afraid that you’ll do something that could hurt them. Hell, afraid that you’ve already done something that will hurt them before they were even conceived. 

“You’ll never know that what you’re going to do could kill you and that you’d gladly lay down your life for theirs. Never have to direct your doctor that if it’s you or them, that it has to be them.”

She took a deep, shaky breath. “And then, you’ll never know what it’s like to have the doctor put that baby in your hands, that thing you nurtured and loved and protected for nine months, and feel… nothing. Or, worse, resentment. To get so angry at this parasite that suckles the milk out of you, and how your mate loves it so, how the two of them have bonded in ways that were supposed to be yours. How it’s stealing him, and he’s stealing it, and to know, to KNOW that it’s all irrational and that you’re nuts, but be afraid to say anything about it.”

Alli bowed her head. “It’s not an excuse. What I did was wrong, but I’m not going to pretend that my mental state didn’t enter into it. PPD plus my grief for Jake, plus wanting to do something–anything–good for someone that had given me so much and just… God, I was a mess. Like I said, it’s not an excuse. I am… I can’t apologize enough for what I did.”

She pulled my hand towards her lips and kissed it softly. “And that’s why I understand, as best I can. Because I’ll never really get how much I hurt you. I’ve tried, I really have; that ‘bank robbery’ analogy you made for Travis was really good. But there’s so much more to it than that. I know that, too.

“PPD is in the DSM-V. It’s recognized by any legitimate psychologist, so common that it’s part of the standard protocol for postpartum care now.” Alli frowned unhappily. “There’s not a name for what I did to you, or if there is, I never found it. 

“But I drove you crazy. I don’t mean that in the silly pop culture way; I really mean it. I broke you. You acted like a completely different person than the man I married, or even the man that you were before I left for that last business trip before you found out. I stole something vital from you, not just your son, but your sense of… of reality, I guess. Of what you could and couldn’t trust. It’s as simple as that. 

“You had given up all other women for me, and part of that bargain was that I would give up all other men for you, only ever carry your child inside me. And I failed in the worst way possible, and I lied to you for years, and I betrayed you. And, yes, I had my reasons, although they weren’t good ones, for all the things I did. But I still did them. 

“I could never fully understand how much it hurt you. A woman… Short of something bizarre like amnesia or a baby swapped at birth, there’s never going to be a woman who has to worry about her husband presenting another woman’s child as hers. It’s ludicrous to even conceive of it.” She chuckled. “No pun intended. 

“But I did something to you that you could never do to me, and even if it wasn’t done in malice–which it wasn’t–I still hurt you horribly. And it was something I could never help you heal from, precisely because I could only ever understand it in superficial ways, from the outside looking in.”

Tears trailed down her cheeks. “You came back to me. You found your way back. You did what you needed to rebuild your trust in me. Did what you needed to… to feel less hurt. And you never threw it in my face. You didn’t point at Alexander and Cynthia and lord it over me, didn’t ask me to help raise them, didn’t mock me or try to hurt me. It was a thing you did for you, at least partially, so that you could heal. It wasn’t intended as a thing you did to hurt me.”

My brows knit together. “How did you…?” 

Alli shrugged, smiling as she wiped her eyes. “I put it all together once I realized you were their father. Your friends needed a donor. They loved you, and they respected you. They could see you were the kind of man they wanted to father their children. I get that. Trust me, more than anyone, I do.

“And they saw how hurt you were, too, how you needed to… ‘Get even’ isn’t right. But reclaim yourself? Your manhood? Like I said, I’ll never entirely understand it. But they could help you with it. They did it for you, and you did it for them. You each had your own selfish reasons, too, but none of it was cruel or malicious, I don’t think.” 

“It wasn’t. I didn’t…” I shook my head. “At first, especially, I didn’t care if it hurt you, but I didn’t do it to hurt you. They needed me, and I needed it for myself, too. You–I’m sorry if this hurts–you didn’t enter into my thinking at all. Not consciously, anyways. Not really.”

She nodded, a melancholy look on her face. “That’s why I can cope with it. It hurts, but even knowing how much it hurts me? I know it’s nothing compared to how much I hurt you, and my act wasn’t malicious either. It was something I did because I couldn’t cope with my PPD and my grief. I was literally crazy when I did it. And I think you were, too.

“I can’t pretend to understand why you did it. ‘It’s a guy thing’ is so reductive, but how I hurt your… sense of masculinity, I guess, it’s just not something I can understand. You might be able to explain it to me, but I’m not asking you to try. Just know that… that I accept it. That I accept you. You forgave me, and I’m so, so grateful. But what I’m telling you is this: there’s nothing for me to forgive.”

Allison stroked my cheek once more. “But I need to know. Was that it? Are those your only other children? The… the only time you were with other women?”

I nodded. “It was. I… You’re right. I didn’t set out to do it, but…” A deep sigh as I collected my thoughts. “I was forty-two, and I wasn’t sure if we were going to make it. Wait, no, that’s not true. I expected we weren’t going to make it. But even if we didn’t, I was too old to raise another kid. I knew that, even if I hadn’t had a vasectomy, the math just didn’t work. 

“Even if I’d divorced you the second you got home from your trip and immediately started looking for someone else, it’d be, say, two years from dating to marriage. And even if we started having kids straight away, I’d have been in my mid-60s by the time the first one graduated from high school. And I’d still have Megan and Travis and Julie to take care of; it’s not like I was going to abandon them.” 

I shook my head. “I hadn’t planned on doing anything, but I felt so… so trapped. Angry. If I did what I knew was right for my family, it would be even longer, and I’d never… I had wanted a son so badly. Most guys do, I think. And you’re right, having that stolen… no, not just stolen from me, but being… replaced, I guess, by another man. Gaslighted. That really fucked me up.”

A sip of my drink steadied my nerves a bit; I hadn’t realized that I’d been clenching my jaw. “When I became friends with Isabella and Janine, and they told me that they were thinking of IVF, I realized I had a chance to… I don’t know.” A self-deprecating chuckle. “Ensure my legacy. Get even with the world. Give them their dream.” I looked away.

Alli laughed. “Fuck a beautiful young woman?”

That made me laugh, too. “I hadn’t intended to, actually.” She looked unconvinced. “No, seriously. They approached me about it; they were good friends by then, like you said, and they knew what… well, what you’d done. And they told me they thought I was smart and kind and handsome–”

“God, you are.” There was no sarcasm there. She was as sincere as I’d ever seen her. I kissed her hand before continuing.

“So I got my vasectomy reversed. I told you I’d gone mountain biking and had hurt myself, so we couldn’t… anyways. There was a chance it wasn’t going to work, but by the time the doctors tested my sperm, I was back to nearly 100%. Plenty, ah, virile enough for their needs. And, well…”

She smiled. “Isabella thought you were handsome. You had already gotten so fit.” Another laugh. “You were so fucking hot by then. Are still so fucking hot.”

“It was partially that; Isabella was honest about it, that she wanted to… She’s bi, and Janine didn’t mind if she indulged with a guy every once in a while, and there was nothing wrong with my sperm, so they could save thousands of dollars by just… not going through IVF. And…” My voice was tight. “I didn’t think you and I were going to make it. And you’d already cheated on me, so what did it matter, right?” Alli nodded, sympathetic, but also still hurt. “But it did. And I’m sorry, sweetheart. I’m so sorry.”

She sniffled, but then just said, “I’m not. I am not. You came back to me. You came back. How doesn’t matter.” Wiping her eyes with the back of her hand again, she said, “But Isabella didn’t have a son.”

“Yeah. And Janine… well, she really wanted to experience motherhood after Isabella had. And while she really is a true blue lesbian, she’s not… she doesn’t hate men. She’s just not attracted to them. 

“But… well, she’s a lesbian, yes, but if I had to pick one defining trait for her, it would be ‘cost-conscious.’” Alli laughed loudly and knowingly at that. She’d spent enough time around my friends to know how frugal Janine could be. “And Isabella was willing to, ah, keep her wife’s mind off of things during the… procedure, so they decided to skip IVF again. And then Alexander was born.”

“And you had a son.”

“Yeah. But that was bittersweet, too. He was my son, but he wasn’t my son. Travis is… I raised him. He’s my son, even if he isn’t my blood. But Alexander… in some ways, that hurts worse. He’s my blood, but I won’t really get to raise him. I’ll get to help, but like an uncle. I won’t see his first steps or hear his first words. I won’t… Well, you understand.

“That’s when my fever broke, I guess you could say. I had two sons who weren’t fully mine; I had made things worse instead of better. I was glad–still am glad–to have helped them. To have…” I chuckled. “Reasserted my masculinity or whatever.”

“Banged two hot chicks?” Her tone was teasing, but not angry. I raised an eyebrow. “Luke, if that’s all it had taken to keep us together, I would have arranged a reverse gangbang with a college cheerleading squad for you. I was serious that I would do anything to keep you as my husband.” I opened my mouth, but she shot me a playful glare. “Too late, mister. We’re already back. You had your chance.”

I laughed. “Can’t blame me for trying. But no. I’m glad that I did what I did, because I don’t think I’d have been able to stay with you if I hadn’t done… something. It just hurt too much, not only what you’d done and the lying, but what… what I didn’t get to do. What I lost. But if my, ah, helping them out also ended up being the reason that we split, because you couldn’t handle it… I don’t know. I’m glad I don’t have to face that, too.”

“No! No, you don’t. But you’re done, right? Just Janine and Isabella? No one else?”

“Yeah, I’m done. Only you, for years now. And just them before that, and only enough to, well, to get the job done.” She smiled happily. “But, now that you know everything, I want to talk to Isabella and Janine and see if they’re okay with me being more involved with the kids, I guess? Is that okay? I won’t ask you to–”

Another sweet kiss from her interrupted me. “I’d love that. They’re your children; I want to watch them grow. You’re such a great dad, and I know you’ll be an amazing ‘uncle.’” Then she got a mischievous grin on her face. “Is that why you insisted on the condoms with me?”

“Not at first. I really was mad, and I didn’t trust you. And then I wasn’t sure if we were going to make it, but even if we did, I knew we shouldn’t have more kids at our age. And then…”

The mischievous grin turned into a wicked smile. “And then it just didn’t matter anymore, right? Once you couldn’t knock me up?”

“Hah, yeah.”

Alli scooted closer and purred, “You know, if you’d told me before, there were… other options.” She took my hand and moved it to her ass while straddling me. “All sorts of other options. I meant it when I said I’d do anything for you.”

A quick move of my fingertips under her panties and between the cleft of her cheeks made her eyes flash. “Are those options still on the menu?”

My wife leaned forward and sucked gently at my neck, then whispered into my ear, “Why don’t we go upstairs, and maybe you can pick a little from column A and a little from column B?”

Well, how was I supposed to say no to that?

With no more secrets between us, our love blossomed again. It was, if anything, stronger than it had been before; bittersweet, perhaps, but it had withstood tests that we knew most marriages never could. We were fiercely loyal to each other, but also able to be honest about insecurities and fears and, yes, even temptations in a way that most couples are never able to, because we knew the cost of losing trust in one another.

Travis eventually did confide in his sisters about what Allison had done, with all of us in attendance. There was stunned silence and tears at first, but when it became clear that their mother and I had gotten through it, they were able to as well. And all of them learned about their half-siblings at the same time; Janine and Isabella had given me permission to tell my children, although I didn’t tell them the, ah, mechanics of how I’d impregnated my friends. That was a secret shared between the four of us.

Allison and I became the de facto babysitters for Cynthia and Alexander. We loved having them in our home, and sometimes Janine and Isabella needed some grownup time; I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t occasionally wistful about the fleeting instances when I’d joined them in said grownup time years before, but Alli more than made up for any regret once the little ones were back with their mothers. Much, much more than.

Cynthia and Alexander turned out to be good practice for how to handle grandkids. Good thing, too. Julie was married not long after she graduated college, to the young man she’d brought home from school that one Thanksgiving break. She gave us twin grandsons within a couple of years.

That was the pattern of our lives: a child graduated from college, and within a few years, we would have more little ones running around underfoot. By the time Alexander had earned his degree, we had seven grandchildren pinballing about, and he added his two to the mix within a few years after that. Our twilight years were filled with more joy and love than many people see in their whole lives. Some of how we had gotten there was awful, but we had gotten there. And in the end, it’s the love and joy that we want to remember, isn’t it?