On April 1, 2002, a month after our son's first birthday, my husband told me that he was going to a conference for work. Had you seen him, as I did not, putting a few items in his car in preparation, you would have noticed that, for a man intending to go to work, he chose to bring some unusual things: a package of condoms, a casual change of clothes, a few toiletries and the address and phone number of a very young Israeli woman he met on a business trip. He attended a few hours of the conference in the morning, changed into casual clothes, met the very young Israeli woman, had sex with her, showered, changed back into his work clothes and came home to me and to our son. However, the fact that he did attend part of the conference made his statement to me not, strictly speaking, a lie.

Just a few months before my daughter was born in 2003, the illusion that was my world shattered; Mark came clean, not just about that day at the conference, but about years of cheating and deception. He entered therapy and recovery for sex addiction, and I began working through my own grief, pain, confusion and betrayal. When I asked him why he remembered the date of that tryst, he replied in a voice that was bitter and cracking with pain, "It was the worst day of my life." That's the day he hit bottom, and it's an anniversary I mark, as I rebuild my life with him.

It seems fitting to me that it was April Fool's day. He and I and that very young woman were all fooling ourselves and each other. We all believed we were something, had something, that was an illusion. And now the joke is over, and like so many April Fool's jokes, it wasn't funny to begin with.

Last year, I took a solo vacation on April Fool's Day. I drove in the pouring rain to the house she had been living in at the time, the house where Mark hit bottom. I pricked my finger and left three drops of blood, swirling and melting into the rain, on the pavement: my own personal cleansing ritual. I thought of Mark, empty and alone, four years ago on that same spot. And I cried. He lost a part of himself there, and I lost a part of myself there, but in the healing that followed we have more than regained it.