This is part of an ongoing series. Start with Part 1.
He was in the bath while I was texting her.
I was sitting on the bed, phone in hand, reading her words back to myself. Since May. The last time was Labor Day weekend. The pieces were still settling into place when I heard the water drain.
He came into the bedroom bare, unbothered, and lay down next to me like it was any other morning.
"Who are you talking to?"
His voice was casual. Innocent. The voice of a man with nothing to hide.
I looked at him.
"Just the girl you've been cheating on me with."
He laughed.
Then: "Oh yeah? What's her name?"
He said it like a dare. Like he was so certain I was bluffing that he could afford to be amused by it.
I said her name out loud.
The laugh stopped.
What followed was something I didn't have a name for then. I do now.
It started with apologies. Soft ones, the kind designed to sound sincere without actually committing to anything. I'm sorry. I messed up. I'm sorry.
Then the shift.
I'm not sorry. You deserved it. You were being a bitch.
Then back again — he was just anxious about the baby. He made a mistake. He was scared. It didn't mean anything.
Then: I don't regret it.
Then sorry again.
I sat there five months pregnant, trying to follow the conversation, trying to find the version of him I could reason with. But there wasn't one. There was just this — this cycling, this shape-shifting, this way of moving through emotions so fast that by the time I responded to one he was already somewhere else entirely.
Later I would learn this has a name. DARVO. Deny, attack, reverse victim and offender.
That morning I just knew it made me feel insane.
Later that same day we went to breakfast. Or lunch. I don't recall.
I don't remember how we got there or why I went. I think I was still in that numb, suspended place where you just move through the motions because stopping feels worse.
We were sitting at the table when his phone buzzed.
He looked at it. His face changed.
It was her. She had texted him: Congratulations on the baby.
"What a fucking bitch," he said. Scoffed. And typed back a reply — one I won't repeat in full, but that included racial slurs directed at the woman he had been sleeping with for months.
No remorse. No recognition of what he'd done. Just immediate, casual cruelty toward her — as if she were the problem. As if she were the one who had done something wrong.
I sat across from him and watched it happen.
And somewhere in that moment, something in me went very quiet.
At some point he suggested we go for a drive.
I don't know why I said yes. Maybe because I didn't know what else to do. Maybe because part of me still wanted him to say something that would make it make sense.
We drove. And while I sat in the passenger seat crying, trying to process the fact that the man next to me had been sleeping with someone else for our entire relationship — while I was falling in love with him, while I was building a future with him, while I was growing his child — he kept trying to reminisce.
Stories from the beginning. Inside jokes. Remember when.
Like if he could just get me back there, back to that version of us, I would forget what I now knew.
I didn't forget.
The next morning I woke up and he wanted sex.
I didn't. I was still in that same numb place — still seeing her name on his phone, still hearing him laugh when I said it out loud. But he persisted, and somewhere between exhaustion and not having the fight left in me, I gave in.
I lay there crying.
He noticed. And he made a joke.
"Is this considered rape?"
He said it lightly. Like it was funny. Like the fact that I was sobbing beneath him was an amusing technicality worth raising.
I didn't answer. I just kept crying.
I was five months pregnant, thinking about him with her, and he was making jokes.
That moment has never left me. Not because of what he did — though that alone would have been enough. But because of how little it registered for him. How small my pain was in that room. How completely beside the point.
I just didn't know yet how much worse it was going to get.
Part 4 coming soon.
If you've ever had your pain treated like an inconvenience by the person who caused it — you are not alone. And you are not crazy.
You were just with someone who needed your confusion more than your clarity.