My Husband's Other Wife (And She's Me)

My Husband's Other Wife (And She's Me)

The love affair began in our own attic, on a Tuesday afternoon meant for sorting old baby clothes.

My hand, groping past boxes of tiny sleepers, brushed against familiar, scuffed leather. My old guitar case. A relic from a life that felt like it belonged to someone else. On a whim, heavy with the dust of years, I tugged it down.

It shouldn’t have felt like a transgression to open it. The guitar was there, my Yamaha acoustic, its strings dull and slack. But resting on its soundboard was a polaroid. Me. Twenty-three, hair a wild dark cloud, wearing the faded Joy Division shirt I’d later sacrificed to a diaper-related emergency. I was mid-laugh, my head thrown back against a sun-drenched brick wall. Two weeks before my first date with Ben.

Beneath it, a Moleskine notebook. Ben’s tight, engineering script filled the pages. My heart stuttered. These weren’t notes. They were elegies.

“October 12th. She played guitar for three hours tonight. Not songs, just patterns. A soundtrack for her own thoughts. I pretended to read. I was watching a soul at play. She exists in a world of her own making, and I am the lucky tourist she lets visit.”

“March 8th. She convinced me to drive to the coast at midnight ‘to hear the waves in the dark.’ We didn’t talk much. She just sat on the hood of the car, humming. I have never known a peace so complete. She carries her own weather, and it is always charged, always alive.”

“November 3rd. She wrote a four-line poem about burnt toast this morning and stuck it to the fridge. It was devastatingly good. How does a person hold so much light? I want to spend my life being a witness to it.”

The pages fluttered from my hands. The silence in the attic was absolute, a vacuum where my breath should have been. Ben, my husband of eight years, the man who kissed my forehead before leaving for work and knew my coffee order by heart, was having a passionate, detailed affair with a ghost.

And the ghost was a version of me I had officially declared deceased. The Me Before. Before the promotions, the mortgage, the two beautiful, draining small humans who called me Mommy. Before the fatigue that seeped into my bones and the mental load that turned my mind into a buzzing spreadsheet. That girl was spontaneous, creative, a vessel of unchecked feeling. I was a planner, a comforter, a manager of emotional and domestic logistics.

I carried the evidence downstairs like a crime scene investigator. That evening, as Ben stirred pasta sauce, I saw it with new, heartbreaking clarity. The flicker. It happened when a song from my old playlist came on. His eyes would go soft, distant, for just a second before landing back on me with a familiar, fond smile. He wasn’t seeing the woman wiping yogurt off the cupboard door. He was seeing the woman who might have danced with the wooden spoon.

The confrontation happened over laundry, the great, mundane leveller of marriages. I placed the notebook on top of a folded stack of his t-shirts.

“I met the other woman,” I said, my voice eerily calm.

He froze, a tiny sock in his hand. His eyes darted to the Moleskine, and understanding—and sheer panic—washed over him. “Claire, it’s not…”

“It is,” I said, cutting him off. “You’ve been writing love letters to a memory. To her.”

He sank onto the bed, the fight gone. “She was… magic,” he breathed, the word a sacred, painful confession.

“She was exhausting,” I corrected, a sudden, sharp bitterness on my tongue. “She was a luxury we couldn’t afford. Life demanded a downgrade. A more efficient model.”

“I don’t want you to be her,” he said, but his gaze was on the polaroid, thumb stroking the image of my carefree face.

“But you miss her.”
A long pause.“Don’t you?” he asked.

The question shattered me. Because yes. God, yes. I missed her like a limb. I missed the girl who saw a rainy day as an excuse to write a song, not a crisis of cancelled park plans.

For a week, the ghost was our silent housemate. I felt her judging me from the sidelines as I packed lunches and scheduled dentist appointments. I had a choice: to stage a seance, to try and drag her back into my skin, or to hold a funeral.

Trying to resurrect her felt like the worst kind of fraud. Putting on that old band shirt felt like a costume. Picking up the guitar, my fingers soft and uncoordinated, felt like trying to speak a language I’d forgotten. The frustration was a hot, humiliating tide. Was the woman I was now—the one who could calm a nightmare and negotiate a peace treaty between siblings over the last blueberry—not worthy of poetry?

The turning point came not with a bang, but with a single, clear note.

It was late. The house was asleep. I didn’t go for my old guitar. I took our daughter’s beginner ukulele from its hook. I sat on the living room floor, a thirty-four-year-old woman in fluffy socks and a robe.

I plucked a string. The sound was silly, small. I formed a C chord, my fingers awkward on the tiny fretboard.

Ben, working late at his laptop, looked up. Not with the ghost-hunting flicker, but with pure, unadulterated curiosity.

I didn’t play a song. I just moved from C to G7, the change slow and clumsy.

“That’s a new sound,” he said gently, closing his laptop.

“It’s the sound of now,” I replied, holding his gaze. “The magic you’re looking for… it’s not in the past, Ben. It’s in the fact that after this brutal, beautiful day, I’m still trying to make music. Just a different kind.”

He came and sat on the floor across from me. He didn’t look for the ghost in my eyes. He saw me—tired, a little sad, but present. He reached out and stilled my fumbling hand on the fretboard, not to correct it, but to hold it.

“Teach me?” he asked.

So I did. Not the old songs. We don’t know them anymore. We’re writing new ones. They are slower. They have gaps for interruptions. Their beauty is not in their wildness, but in their resilience. The other wife, the ghost of me, still exists in that notebook. We don’t erase her. We just finally turned the page.