Sarah Connelly — Part 1: The Screenshot
I want to tell you something I have never told anyone in full.
Not my mum. Not my best friend. Not the women I have met since who asked me how my marriage ended.
I always said we grew apart. It was easier than the truth.
My name is Sarah Connelly. I was married to a man called Rob for nine years. We met at university, got engaged at 27, bought a house in Nottingham at 29. We had a dog called Barley and a shared Netflix account and a kitchen we renovated together the summer before everything fell apart.
From the outside we looked fine. I think that was the thing that hurt the most afterwards. How normal it all looked.
Rob worked in sales. He travelled a lot. Manchester, Birmingham, sometimes Glasgow for a few days at a time. I never questioned it. Why would I. He was my husband.
It was a Tuesday in March when I found out. Not in some dramatic way. No lipstick on a collar. No suspicious phone call I overheard.
I was using his laptop to print a boarding pass for a weekend I had booked to visit my sister in Edinburgh. His email was open. I wasn’t looking for anything.
The name in the inbox was a woman called Claire. The subject line said thinking about you.
I didn’t open it straight away. I sat there for about thirty seconds just staring at the screen. Some part of me already knew.
I opened it.
I won’t say what it said. But I will tell you it wasn’t the first one. There were forty seven emails going back eleven months. I counted them later that night sitting on the bathroom floor.
Eleven months.
I closed the laptop. I printed my boarding pass from my phone. I went to Edinburgh that weekend and I didn’t say a word to Rob.
I needed to think.
What Rob didn’t know was that I spent that weekend making a plan. Not a revenge plan. Just a plan. I had always been the organised one in our marriage. Turns out that was useful.
I came home on the Sunday. Made dinner. Asked him how his weekend was. He said quiet, just relaxed at home. I nodded and said that sounded nice.
He had spent the weekend with Claire. I already knew that too.
Read Part 2 here: justiceserveddaily.com/sarah-connelly-part-2-the-plan