Broken Vows

Night eventually came. Toni stayed and we continued to drink wine until I passed out. The house now smelled of stale cigarettes and booze. How far I had fallen in 48 hours.

Sunday morning came and went. More crying and still no Todd. Sunday evening rolled around and no Todd. Toni and I did not do much accept look at each other and drink and occasionally cry together. Monday morning, I called in and told my boss that after such a hard week at the retreat, I was run down and needed a few days to recharge my batteries. She was more than ok with this, and told me to take the week. I had earned it after all I had done for the company.

Still no word from Todd.

Tuesday came, and Toni decided that we had waited long enough. We needed more help with the problem. The first thing we did was call Todd's executive assistant Francie. Francie was about six months from retirement but had been like a second wife to Todd for over 10 years. If there was anyone that would know where he was, it would be his work wife. All Francie could tell us was he had sent an email from his private account saying that he was taking a "much needed" two-week vacation and would not be available by phone or email. My heart was crushed even further. Once again, I broke down and continued to cry on and off for the next few hours.

During that time, Toni made the decision to bring in more professional help. She called Shawn and Beth. They showed up a little later and sat and listened to the story of my betrayal. Occasionally, they would ask questions. Probe for more details. I was forced to give the gory details of what I could remember. I guess it was their law enforcement backgrounds. At the end, I begged them for help, and it took less than a micro second for them to say they would help without any hesitation. Shawn said he would drop everything and find Todd. Beth looked me in the eyes and swore to me that if it was the last thing she did, she would destroy Peter.

Who is Peter? Well by now you must have guessed that he was man I betrayed my husband with on the retreat. Peter worked for our company in my group for about 7 years. He was a good looking cocky "boy" in his late 20's who was married with two beautiful children and one very hot wife. However, that did not stop him from flirting with all the women in the office. Todd and I had met them all at the company picnic a few years back and although I would not say we were best of friends, we did like each other and would hang out at company functions sometimes.

Like I said, Peter had always been a flirt. He would always tell me how pretty I was, and how my eyes were so beautiful, and make comment's like, "well, if you were my wife...bla bla bla." I thought it was all flattering coming from someone almost 15 years younger than me, but I never really took it seriously. I did recognize that his boyhood crush was nothing more than an attempt to flirt with his boss to get on my good graces. With his good looks and great chiseled muscles, why not flirt with the boss and move up the corporate strategic ladder faster. Let's face it, we all don't like it, but we are in marketing and soft skills and flirting is an integrated portion of our jobs. For many years that was the extent of our relationship, until the retreat.

The last night of the retreat is where it all went wrong. First let me tell you about the executive retreat. It is for the top leaders and the up and comers in the organization. We stay at an executive camp located in the heart of the Chattahoochee National Forest. It is very exclusive. It is set in an area of the forest where there is no cell service, and the nearest anything is 10 miles away. It was designed that way. A week where you are forced to cope without outside influence. No televisions. No radios. No cell phones. No emails or social media. In other words, no outside world. If there is an emergency, someone can call in and out to the camp organizers, but entire team (including the president of the company) is forbidden to use a phone. At the beginning of the week everyone is randomly paired up with someone for the entire week. I drew Peter. Every event we did, we did together. Every win was ours. Every loss was ours. We studied together. We presented together. We ate together. We drank together. And, of course this led us to party together at night. All seemed great, until that last night.

The program was over and most of my marketing team was settled outside at a fire pit with their teammates relaxing and unwinding. We had all been out of contact with the "real world" for a week, so the booze was flowing and everyone was joking and laughing with each other. Peter was pretty drunk, as was I and during the evening he hugged me a few times, celebrating our victories during the week. I did not think much of it. Team bonding is the goal of the week. All was fun and innocent games, until he passed me a bottle of hard liquor and told me to take a drink straight from it. I told him no, and that is when he started making fun of me. Taunting and teasing me about being an old woman. I sort of remember him telling me that he had me all wrong. I was not as young and cool as he thought I was. Maybe, I was just a little over the hill. I felt insulted. I was not old. I was not over the hill. I was going to show this young punk. I took his dare and slugged the whiskey straight back a few times.

Looking back, after that, the evening started becoming blurry. It was like those few times I had drank too much when I was back in college and blacked out. However, this time, something was different. It was quick. I was dizzy. I was out.

When I woke up the next morning, I was naked in bed, with Peter lying next to me. That was bad. However, what was disturbing the most, was the dry cum that had leaked out of me onto my left leg. I was horrified. What had I done? Why I had broken my marital vows with my husband. I don't remember much, but it was as clear at the stains on the bed, we had had sex last multiple times the previous night. I quickly shot up, and started to grab my clothes. Peter stirred and said, "Come on baby, come back to bed and let's do it again. You promised me your ass, and I have not had it yet." If I was not convinced before I had had sex outside my marriage, I was 100% certain now. I quickly dressed, grabbed my stuff, and at the last second grabbed Peter's phone and ran out of the cabin. I was afraid he might have taken my picture during the night, and I was not going to allow that.

I went straight to my car, started it up and began to drive home. It was only when I got to within 30 minutes of our house, did I really start to think about what I had done, and more importantly how much it was going to hurt my husband. I pulled into a liquor store to get grab liquid courage. Instead my typical bottle of wine, I grabbed a pint of Captain Morgan's and as I was about to pay, I saw a package of Marlboro Light cigarettes. It had been over 20 years since I had needed a smoke, but today I needed one bad. I sat in the parking lot for 30 minutes and tried to drink myself into enough courage to face my husband and tell him the truth which would probably devastate and ruin our marriage.

Todd:

It is amazing how lost you can get when you want to be. I was lucky to get to Key West alive. I was drunk most of the three hours driving along the bridges to get to the Southernmost point in the United States. I had no idea where I was, I did not plan, I did not know what I wanted to do. My only thought was to drink myself into a mind-numbing stupor, and cry myself to sleep.

I found a cheap hotel a few blocks from the beach and paid for 2 weeks in advance with a large amount of the cash in my wallet. I did not want Stacy to find me yet. I wanted some time to think. To process. I knew that using my credit cards would alert her exactly where I was, so I paid for everything with cash. I used the hotels computer to log onto my Google account and sent my assistant Francie and e-mail telling her that I would be taking two weeks' vacation. I knew I would need that long to think about what I wanted to do with my life after my wife's devastating confession.

I knew that soon, I would have to get "back on the grid", because I only had enough cash to eat for about 10 days (assuming I continued to drink like I was), and then I was going to have to hit a bank or my credit cards. I assumed my wife had not already cleaned me out to go be with her lover. I thought about it for a short second, then took another strong swig of the whiskey and tried to push that awful thought out of my mind.

Being by yourself with only your thoughts can be painful. Very painful. Every worst nightmare of Stacy and her lover came to my thoughts. She had been with him for years behind my back. She had been with multiple men since we were married. Was he bigger than me? Was he a better lover than me? Was he a better person than me? Does everyone we know, know about her affair and laughed about it behind my back? The thoughts of them flooded over me constantly, and I tried to remain in a state of near drunkenness. I kept asking why???? Why???? did this happen to me...to us?

The nice thing about Key West is that you can stay drunk pretty much most all the time, and nobody really cares. Everyone sort of dismisses the fact that you are wasted, even at 9 am in the morning. I came to the conclusion that nobody really cared about me or my problems.

Since I had walked out without anything, I was forced to wear my same clothes every day. I did not shave and soon started to grow a scruffy beard. After a few days, when I looked in the mirror, I was no longer the president of a multimillionaire-dollar firm. I saw only a stranger. I had degraded to nothing more than a smelly drunk wandering the streets of Key West most of the day, depressed and angry at life. How far I had fallen.

Shawn:

It was no use. I could not find him. Todd had done it right. He had disappeared and there was no trace of him anywhere. If I had not known Stacy any better, I would have had the cadaver dogs sniffing in the back yard that first day. Beth and I had called in every favor we knew. We tried tracking his credit cards and bank cards and they had not been used. There was camera footage of him getting on the I-85 heading South, but as soon as the DOT cameras disappeared, so did he. We knew based on his initial direction, he was most likely in South Georgia, or Florida. But let's face it, trying to track a dark BMW 3 series in South Georgia was about as difficult as trying to track a silver Ford F150. Everyone in the South owned one.

Taking a long shot, I called a friend in the Central Florida Highway Patrol and asked him to start a Bolo for Todd as a person of interest in an ongoing investigation. Maybe we could get lucky and score a hit. With my Captain's help, it was the closest thing we could do to use "official" resources to find a missing person at that level.

In the meantime, my wife Beth was all over Peter. She knew everything about the guy, including his second-grade teachers name within 4 hours. To her this was personal. She knew that Stacy always considered Toni her best friend, but there was only one other person Stacy had wanted in her wedding and that was Beth. To her, Stacy was like a sister.

The first thing she did was take Peter's "borrowed" phone from Stacy and said she planned to get it hacked. When Toni reminded her, using her lawyer voice, that it wasn't exactly legal for an Atlanta PD officer, Beth's response was, "It sounds to me like she was drugged. I think she is a victim of rape. Was it legal when Peter raped Stacy?" That stopped the conversation quick. It was clear, Beth was out for blood. She believed Stacy had been raped and she was going to do everything to prove it. There was more crying from Stacy and Toni, but my wife did not budge. She remained focused and on target. She was going to get Peter, for what he had done to her friend.

It is amazing how stupid some people are with their passwords. It took Beth's hacker friend, four minutes with a little help from Peter's personnel online information, to get his password. Really, Peter!, your birthday in reverse? Beth took the phone numbers in the phone and started cross referencing them in the Atlanta police database. 20 minutes later she had a lead. A name, AK was stored in the phone and it was tied to a suspected well-known dealer of ecstasy and rohypnol. Beth had her connection. Now all she needed to do was to make Peter pay.

Beth contacted two of her closest friends on the force, and soon they were skirting the law in search of Peter and AK. It did not take long to find Peter and on the first stakeout night we hit pay dirt. He went to a club and we observed him appear to buy drugs at the bar from the suspect AK. In a mere matter of minutes, Beth and her two friends made themselves bait for Peter. Did he ever go for it. Three beautiful women come up to you and start making googly eyes. He should have known better. As I videotaped him from the second level of the club, he spiked Beth's drink with something as she walked onto to the dance floor with her friends. I gave the signal and they took him down to the floor and put the cuffs on him. It is a shame he broke his nose resisting arrest when he appeared to struggle to get away. With the drink in hand, the drugs in his pocket we had an easy conviction for felony possession and attempted rape.

With Beth's vow kept, it was now up to me to find Todd before he did something stupid. At this point, one bad decision that would probably end up destroying the rest of his, Stacy's and their kid's lives.

Todd:

When you don't care, it is easy to make friends. After a week, I probably knew more people in Key West than I did in Atlanta. I would walk into a bar and it seemed everyone knew my name. I was turning into a local. But I still hurt and I felt torn up inside. I still did not know what I wanted to do next. Nothing was coming to my mind. I knew I was running out of time hiding from my problems, but I just did not see a way out.

And then I met Kitty.

I was sitting at the bar, doing what I did every night. Drinking, listening to music and feeling sorry for myself. Like my usual these days, I was talking to nobody, drinking a lot and shedding a tear for my destroyed marriage. Everything I had worked for, everything I had loved felt so distant from me. My old life was slowly drifting away and I was unsure if I even wanted to go back to it. Then, she sat down next to me. She told me her name, and my first thought was, who would name their kid Kitty? Really, it's the name of a stripper or prostitute. I guess if you expect your daughter to grow up to be a stripper it is a good name, but no decent parent would never name their kid Kitty.

She was 23 years old. Five foot two inches, and 115 lbs of perky blonde bubbly fun. That is all I saw in my drunken state. A cute smile and a perfect bra-free rack that pointed in my direction and entitled me to say hello. She looked over and stared me in the eyes, and said, "Todd, let's take a walk on the beach alone".

A million thoughts raced through my mind in an instant. The first was of my beautiful wife and that I could never do this to her. I made vows. I was a sensible, responsible, conservative adult. I went to church on Sunday. I paid my taxes. I had money and standing in the community. I had two beautiful kids and a nice house in the suburbs. I drove a BWM for Christ sake! This is not who I was. I did not accept the invitation of the Devil's Handy-woman to take a walk on a private deserted beach at night in the Keys.

And then I found myself getting off the stool, taking her hand and walking towards the door onto the street. We walked in relative silence for about 40 minutes until we got to the very private section of the beach. On the way, she had stopped to buy a small bottle of Jack Daniels for us. When we got there, we sat and she asked me questions about who I was and where I came from. I found myself answering her honestly. Like a priest she was able to listen attentively without passing judgement.

She asked me about my kids and about how I was Mike's baseball coach when he was young. We talked about Terry and her going to UNC. Kitty seemed really interested in hearing about the times I took the kids camping and waterfall hunting in western South Carolina. She wanted to hear about my business and what I liked to do for fun before I came to Key West. The one thing she did not ask me about was my wife, Stacy. Not a word was spoken about her. Her name was never mentioned.

We had been on the beach for about one hour talking on the sand, listening to the soft crash of the waves as they came up on shore. Then, after a short silence, she passed me the bottle, looked me straight in the eye, and whispered, "What is your wife's name?"

I responded, "What makes you think I am married? I have been in the same bar with you for a week and you have never seen me with anyone."

She smiled, took another short swig and said, "I have looked into your eyes for five days straight. The emptiness keeps getting stronger. Only that much hurt can come from someone you truly love. You are still wearing your wedding ring. Meaning, she either recently died, or she had an affair on you. Which was it?"

I was very quiet for about one minute. All we could hear was the ocean. I responded softly, "The second. Her name is Stacy, and a week ago she told me that she had been unfaithful. After she told me, I got up and walked out on her."

We sat there for the next 30 minutes. Not a word was spoken. We just passed the bottle between us and drank back and forth.

Eventually, Kitty looked over at me and decided to speak. She said, "Do you love her?"

"What?" I replied. Not knowing just how to answer that question.

"Do you love her?" she repeated softly. So soft, I almost couldn't hear her.

And to that, I thought for a few minutes, and eventually said, "Yes, that is what is making my heartache so much that I want to die."

"Tell me what happened", she whispered. I did. Bits and pieces from the first time I first saw her stepping out on the back porch of the fraternity house to have a cigarette until the minute I left the state of Georgia.

When I was finished, we were once again silent. For about the next 20 minutes, not a word was spoken. We just continued to pass the bottle. All I could hear was the waves and Kitty softly crying to herself as we drank the Tennessee Whisky. Eventually, she turned to me and asked me if I would like to hear her story. She said that it might help me understand and feel better about my predicament. Interested in what she might have to say, I looked over at her and said, "Sure, I have all night, and for that matter, all week and possibly the rest of my life."

For the next hour, Kitty told me about her life. She was born in rural Florida. Not the part with the Mouse or the Killer Whales. The part of Florida where a double wide trailer is considered living in style. Her mother got pregnant when she was 17 by her "father", who was a whopping 54. He left soon after Kitty was born almost a year later. It was actually her father who gave her the nickname Kitty. Her real name was Tonya and she confessed she preferred Tonya, but everyone had known her as Kitty for so long that it had stuck.

Her mom tried to do her best, but since she was only a waitress all she could do was work and try to be both parents. Kitty had her grandmother till she was 12, but when she passed Kitty was on her own. Even though, Kitty grew up with better than average grades, which was surprising given her life, she eventually believed that her only path to success was to try and get a man who could take care of her.

So, when at the tender age of 19, Billy came along, she accepted his offer and 6 months later they were married. The odd part of this story was that Kitty still had plans for her life. With her high school degree, a job as a bartender, and a lot of ambition, she planned to go back to school and become a nurse. But, as with all good stories, the problems began. Billy lost his job, and could not find one. This got him angry...and drunk, a lot. He would spend their savings on nights out with his friends and come home stinking of booze and other women. The anger eventually turned towards rough sex. Rock bottom occurred when Billy tried to convince Kitty he could share her with his friends (possibly for money). He was adamant to Kitty it would be fun. It wasn't for Kitty. The end came when their landlord threatened to kick them out of their crappy apartment for not paying the rent. Billy had spent the rent money getting high. Since Kitty was the only one with a job, thus making all the earnings, she said something about it. In response, he hit her. It was just once, but once was all it took. That was 3 months ago.