When Good News is Bad

Author's note: I know that I need an editor, so if anyone wants to volunteer for the future, please message me. I wrote this on a lark....just had it bubbling in my head. Nothing terribly new or terribly exciting....just an exploration of how fast things can go from good to bad. Not a lot of BTB, but a happier ending for the victim is sometimes the best revenge.

There are some statements that should only trigger a happy response. My wife telling me that she was pregnant was one of them. If she'd had health issues and we hadn't been planning on a baby that might have changed things, but we'd already been through the health evaluation. The doctor assured us that from a physiological stand point we were perfectly ready to get pregnant.

"I'm pregnant." Jenny couldn't meet my eyes when she said it. We'd talked about having children together since we became an exclusive couple in college. We knew the names that we wanted to use, depending on if it was a boy or a girl. We even had a plan for how far apart we wanted to space them.

"Well, that kind of changes things, doesn't it?" I was subdued and exhausted at this point. If I hadn't been the shock and pain of her revelation would have been unbearable. My plans for the future had changed so much in the last three weeks and adding this piece of information didn't help. I was only back in our house sitting across the kitchen table talking to her because it was the final stipulation to get her to sign the divorce papers. We'd made small talk when I first got there, but it was all very meaningless. Clearly, she wanted to tell me to my face about the child she was carrying.

"I know the answer, but I have to ask. Is there any way that we can work through this? I love you so much and I know how badly I've hurt you, but I just can't believe that there is no way to fix things." Tears rolled down Jenny's cheeks for the millionth time and I realized that I no longer felt the same. The need to comfort her, to tell her that everything was going to be alright was gone. Inside I was awash in sorrow, anger and a truckload of betrayal that I'd never seen coming.

"There's no way that it's mine, is there? I mean, since we haven't slept together since I left for the last business trip in February it doesn't seem possible." I was losing my best friend, the person I planned to spend forever with. If somehow the baby she was carrying was mine then there was some tiny spark of hope that we could find a way to stay together.

"No. I'm so sorry..." Jenny stood up from the kitchen table we'd been sitting at and headed upstairs to the master bedroom we no longer shared. I guess the look on my face told her what she needed to know. There was no way I was going to raise the product of her infidelity as my own child. She was going to get to deal with that aspect of her cheating all on her own. I got up, looked around our kitchen one last time and left for good.

Three weeks ago, I had just gotten home from a month-long business trip that had taken me all over the country. I'd rushed up to our home office to add some details that I had been finishing on the plane before sending the finished product in. As fate would have it, my laptop chose that moment to die. I didn't store anything locally on it, so it wasn't a catastrophe, but I needed to finish up my work while it was still fresh. I'd grabbed Jenny's computer and, after getting her to login, I'd jumped back into the project.

One of the side effects of all the web-based services that we use is that we forget that things overlap. Jenny's company and my company both used the same web-based platform. We met while she was studying art and I was studying electrical engineering in college. Jenny went on to become a lawyer and works on copyright infringement cases and makes a lot of money doing it. I'm a network engineer and do consulting for multi-national companies to help them build secure infrastructure to keep their networks up and running around the globe. We end up logging in to the same service with different user names and passwords for normal email, but have VPN connectivity for sensitive work-related stuff.

As I was logging into webmail I wasn't really paying attention until I noticed that in addition to Jenny's account that I knew about there was another account called French_whore. I was kind of surprised and my curiosity got the better of me. Sadly, the password credential for the unfamiliar account was already stored in her browser. As I read, I felt like I was being led through one of the Holocaust museums that have been built on the site of the concentration camps in Europe. The horror is palpable as you take in the meaning of what they are showing you. I've always fallen silent when I toured those reminders of just how deeply into depravity humans can dive. That's how I felt as I read Jenny's messages with her lover.

I'm a quick study and it only took me about 30 minutes to gather the pertinent details. He was a former client. He was a French artist/designer of African descent and Jenny had worked with him for almost a year before getting him a large settlement for infringement. I could remember her talking about him a little; something about how talented he was. They had not become lovers until after the case was finished, as far as I could tell, and her firm had sent him the notice that they were no longer his attorneys of record. That was just a normal, final step after a one time case had been finalized and there were no more financial strings between them.

I couldn't tell if they had been flirting during the case or exactly when the actual affair started. The messages I read only told part of the story, but they went back at least 6 months. To say that I was in shock was a mild understatement. I had the presence of mind to forward the pictures and video to a separate account so that I could access them again if needed.

Jenny was sitting in our family room when I came back downstairs with her computer. She had a cup of something hot in her hands as she rested on the comfortable lounger that looked out onto our back yard. It was early April and the trees were starting to bud out, but it was still a bit cool in the evenings. She looked so beautiful with her long dark hair and fair complexion offset by the cashmere sweater and leggings she wore. I couldn't know, but she was already pregnant at that point and perhaps she glowed that much more from the magic of the new life she carried.

"Dave, what's wrong?? You look like you've seen a ghost." Jenny had set her mug on the end table and turned to look at me when she'd seen the look on my face. I knew that I was in trouble and my emotions were quickly getting the better of me. I clicked on the start button of the video of my wife and her, made sure the volume was loud and then set the laptop down with the screen facing her.

"Oh no...no...please, Dave." The shock on her face lasted briefly, followed by tears and sorrow. Jenny's dark eyes turned to meet mine as she begged me to let her explain. Under most other circumstances the sight of my beloved wife crying and reaching out to me would have been impossible to resist.

"Just ask the French Whore where she wants the divorce papers sent. I'm leaving now so that I don't do something that I will regret." I'm not a violent man. I'd never been in any sort of physical fight aside from minimal training in martial arts when I was in high school. My desire to grab Jenny and try to pass along my emotional pain to her was so hard to resist.

"Dave, please don't go. Please let me explain!!" I'm sure she said a lot of other things, but I was so focused on getting away from her that I didn't hear them. By the time I was in my car and backing out of the garage I was vaguely aware of Jenny standing at the top of the stairs into the garage screaming. Leaving now probably saved her life because I can't guarantee that I wouldn't have killed her when the shock wore off and the agony and anger flooded me as I drove.

Today, we've both hired lawyers and the initial separation documents have been filed. I've buried myself in work and legally prescribed drugs. When you live in the world of affluence that Jenny and I did it was very easy to get in to see a top flight psychiatrist. There are some pretty amazing drugs out there if you need them and I took them.

"Well, Dave, I think that we've gotten as far as we are going to get with Jenny and her lawyer. She will sign off on the divorce and stop fighting if you will agree to meet her at your house and talk things over. My recommendation is to go, be nice, don't say anything you can't live up to and then be done." My attorney wasn't known for being a real shark in family court. I didn't need a shark because we had a prenup. Financially, there would be no strings to tie us together after the divorce. She made plenty of money, I made plenty of money and we didn't have kids or a business together. My parents and I weren't close, but when I called to tell them about the divorce they took my side and that was that. I didn't have any close relationships with any of her siblings except for her baby sister. Caroline was studying at MIT and loved to talk engineering when their family got together.

"It's weird that this has all only taken three weeks. I expected months of haggling, but with the prenup I guess there wasn't much to fight about. You can tell her lawyer that I will be at out house tonight at 6. Do I need to have a witness or something so that she can't claim I hit her or something else really stupid?" Seeing Jenny again was not going to be easy. Thanks to the medication that was working I wasn't a blubbering idiot nor a raging homicidal maniac.

"Here's what you do. Call me from the front door when you get there and put it on speaker. Tell her that you have your attorney on the phone just to ensure no funny business and that you will leave if she objects. I will record the call and if she pulls something we will keep you out of trouble. Work?" Common sense solutions like this were the reason two of my co-workers had steered me to Preston Marks, esp. He charged a hefty rate for his services, but you didn't feel like he was wasting your time nor giving you bad advice. He ended our call with a reminder to be careful.

The only question that I wanted to ask Jenny was why. What caused her to abandon our marriage for another man? What had I done wrong? What had she been so unhappy about that she cheated on me? I never got to ask it and after a few months of therapy I realized that there was nothing she could have said that would have helped. I could never trust her again.

It would be fun to say that Jenny was a complete mess after we divorced. The truth was that she looked just as beautiful pregnant as I knew she would. I ran into her now and then because of mutual friends. It was really awkward and one of us always left. I think that her employers must have found out about her affair with a former client because a little bird told me that she had been given a one-time warning about it never happening again.

I didn't really start dating again until almost a year after the fateful day that Google had proven my wife's undoing. I went out with some friends, watched a lot of sports, and ended up spending time with Jenny's sister. Caroline was only 19 and I was 30 so it wasn't something either of us bragged about. I guess she's always had a crush on me and as Jenny's belly grew her whole family figured out who cheated on whom. When the baby was born bi-racial there was even less doubt about why the divorce happened since the kid couldn't be mine. Jenny's family loved the little girl no matter what, but Jenny wasn't able to play victim. When the divorce was final Caroline went from just hanging around to something else.

"So, are you going to marry me or not?" My twenty year old girlfriend was naked again and looking up at me from my bed that we had just completely messed up . The dark hair and eyes ran in the family, but where my ex-wife Jenny was ballerina skinny Caroline was a bubble butt and round perfect breasts to match.

"Aren't you a little bit young to be thinking about getting married? Shouldn't you be telling me that it's time for you to move on and sew some wild oats in college before you get old and tired?" I was teasing her because we'd have this same conversation at least 5 times over the last 6 months. I'd tried really hard to resist Caroline at first. She was just as pretty as Jenny, but she was sexy where Jenny was elegant and demure. She'd driven down to my place exactly 6 months after the divorce was final and told me that she was staking her claim.

We'd remained friends through the divorce and had grown to really enjoy bouncing engineering ideas off each other. Caroline was only in her sophomore year, but she was wicked smart. When I stumped her with an idea she had a tendency to use her feminine wiles to get help from unwitting computer science students who specialized in what I did. She never slept with any of them, she just...charmed them into thinking she might. I had been on the end of those charms and it took all my will power to resist.

The first time we slept together was one month after Caroline had told me she didn't want to be just friends any more. She had told me all about her new niece and how Jenny as doing. It seemed that she was trying to gauge just how much I was till pining for my ex. When she finally decided that I was really over Jenny, we ended up making love all night; no matter how hard I tried to resist. By the next morning I knew I was hooked, but I expected that she would move on soon enough when she had her fill of her big sister's beau.

8 months later Caroline showed no signs of leaving. She basically lived in my condo when she wasn't up at school. I suppose she could be cheating on me during the days and weeks that we spent apart, but she communicated too often and was so transparent about everything she was doing that I had no spark to kindle the insecurities that her sister had cut into my soul.

"Well, if you look in the nightstand there is a box and a ring that should fit you. Since you've been asking me to marry you for the last few weeks I thought I should be prepared in case you got serious. If you decide to wear the ring then I guess we are getting married." She wore the ring and the future is going to be interesting. I don't know if Caroline and Jenny struggle because I divorced on sister and am going to marry the next. Frankly, as long as Caroline is happy with it then so am I.