"Truths and roses have thorns about them"

A gorgeous blue sky and a crispness in the air was a welcome sign of autumn. A time of the year DF and I both enjoyed immensely. He was gathering leaves in our garden, while I was tending to the laundry ~ a normal late Sunday afternoon routine. When sorting the clothes to place in the washing machine, I came across a receipt in the pocket of a pair of his jeans. The purchase was for 7 roses from a local florist and placed on his Swiss bank MasterCard, the receipt bore the sentiment to be placed on an accompanying card and a woman's name, KMC, and a delivery address in the next town. "Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday" it read.

My heart sunk and I reflected on the 7 days he'd gone missing in Europe, the cool reception I'd received at the airport when he returned and remembered the luggage handling tags that I'd removed from the suitcases and placed in a file folder in our home office. This had been a habit since we'd been accustomed to saving records of our trips back and forth over the years for immigration purposes. I dashed upstairs to retrieve the folder, indeed, my suspicions were confirmed. The baggage handling tag was encrypted with the same last name. I could feel my heart thumping in my chest while tears welled up and trickled down my face.

I summoned up all of my calmer emotions before he came back into the house to get ready for dinner. After dinner was over we lit a fire in the library and settled down to watch a movie. Calmly, I removed the crumpled yellow paper from my pocket and passed it to him and simply asked, "What is this?". What ensued was a retort from DF that was quite unexpected. "It's not what you think, but I want a divorce! We need to talk". Still quite numb from the discovery, I said that I wanted to go for a walk, alone, but he stood in front of the door and wouldn't let me leave. I wanted to escape and gather my thoughts. We were, after all, newlywed, having been married for just 25 months. I swallowed hard and managed to utter the words, "That's not necessary. We need to work on this" and darted for the bedroom before my face was drenched by the gush of tears.