At first, we barely spoke on the phone.
I didn’t question it too much.
Maybe because I had my own secrets, my own marriage quietly unraveling behind closed doors.
Maybe because part of me didn’t want to look too closely at the silences between us.

Now I know it was because he was hiding something:
Her.
The wife I didn’t know existed yet.

But back then, the space between our conversations felt more like distance than deceit.
We lived hours apart, and I had my own limitations, too.
My time wasn’t fully mine.
My heart wasn’t fully free.

Still, I reached a breaking point.

I told him, if all you can give me are messages on a screen, I don’t want it. If this is going to be anything real, I need your voice. I need more.

And to his credit, he gave it to me.
He made time; morning, noon, and night.
He found little pockets in his day and gave them to me.
And I gave him mine, even if I had to sneak away from a life I hadn’t fully walked out of.

Some nights, we’d talk for hours. I’d lie in the dark, pretending to be asleep, whispering just to hear his voice.
There was something in the way he spoke to me; soft, present, like I was already his.
And maybe part of me already was.

He knew I was married.
I told him early on, I didn’t hide that.
I was honest about where I was in life, about the mess I was in, about the way I was slowly detaching from someone I had once loved deeply.
I gave him my truth.
I just didn’t know he hadn’t given me all of his.

He knew I wasn’t ready for divorce.
Not because I still believed in us, but because walking away felt like tearing apart something I had once built with hope, our home, our family, our son.
He was so little then, still learning the world, and I didn’t know what it would mean to raise him between two separate lives.

And maybe, deep down, I still wanted to say I tried.
That I didn’t just run when things got hard, even though my heart had been running for months.

I knew what I was doing wasn’t right.
I should’ve ended things with my husband the moment I realized I was seeking something outside of us.
I should’ve walked away with clarity instead of lingering in emotional limbo.
But I couldn’t. Not yet.
Not until I knew what this new connection would become.
Not until I knew if the feelings I had for this man, this unknown, magnetic force, were fleeting… or the beginning of something I could actually build a future with.

And truthfully, I didn’t know what we were.
This new man… unexpected, intense, emotionally disarming; felt like possibility. Like breath after drowning.
But he was also a kind of unknown I wasn’t used to, mysterious, guarded, yet magnetic in a way that made it hard to turn away.
A man I barely knew, yet felt deeply pulled to.
Someone I wanted to trust, even when his edges stayed just out of reach.

So I stayed in between.
One foot grounded in the life I’d built… and the other stepping into something I couldn’t yet name.