This is the fifth in a series of posts on how I came to discover my husband's sex addiction five years ago.

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During the last trimester of my pregnancy with my daughter, I entered a nesting phase, cleaning and organizing obsessively in preparation for her arrival. One of the tasks I set for myself was to rid us of dozens upon dozens of obsolete old floppy disks that were littering our computer desk. Most of the disks were more than five years old, dating to the last time we owned a computer with a built-in floppy drive.

I would check each disk, discarding those that were unreadable and sorting through the remaining information to transfer anything worthwhile onto CD. In sorting through these disks, I found one containing old e-mail messages: among them a series from my husband to his friend Laurie and from Laurie to Mark. We rarely heard from her anymore, and Mark never mentioned her; it had been years since I'd given their friendship any thought. Yet here she was again, fresh as if she were writing that day. The ripple started years ago by that particular pebble was finally upon me.

As I started reading, I felt a burning sickness rise from my stomach to my throat and sear through my face. I'd forgotten just how hurtful and sexually suggestive the messages were. Somehow, without Laurie's continued presence in my life, I thought I'd overreacted as a nervous bride-to-be, but confronted with the communications again, the hurt and shame and fury came rushing back in one all encompassing wave. How could I have forgotten how really awful those messages were?

However, in addition to the messages I'd seen before, there were new ones: messages sent and received after Mark was supposed to have "toned things down," messages from after we were married. And the new messages were more sexually explicit than the old. The communication had broken off after the last time we'd seen Laurie, but it had gone on for far longer and was far more intimate than anything I had been aware of before.

At that moment, with a trail of five year old messages clear before me, the wave came crashing down. Suddenly every odd receipt, every strange new interest, every inexplicable friendship, every late night watching porn, every doubt, every splinter in my mind, everything, everything came rushing at me like a rapid video montage from some sci-fi movie. I could feel my mind on fire as a new possibility occurred to me for the very first time: maybe these weren't discreet events; maybe my marriage wasn't marked occasionally by a few bizarre, unexplainable events; maybe it contained a constant, consistent undercurrent. I saw a pattern.

I showed Mark some of the worst of the messages and told him we needed to find time to talk. So, one summer night five years ago, we tucked our son into bed and sat on the sofa together. We actually hadn't cleared our schedule, I had plans to drive a friend to the airport that night; for some reason, I (mistakenly) felt that this wouldn't take long. We'd have a nice chat, he'd see all the things that hurt me, and when he understood, he'd stop. He sat straight up on the sofa and I faced toward him, away from the room, with my legs stretched out on the sofa, my pregnant belly resting on his thigh and my head occasionally on his chest as we talked.

I started with Laurie and laid out every splinter. I hammered away relentlessly with the same questions repeated over and over: why? why do you do things that make me doubt you? why don't these things make sense? what is it that's wrong? what is going on?

I came at last to a receipt for drinks for two that I found while doing laundry. It was from a hotel bar where he had attended an event. I knew about the event, but thought he went alone. When I questioned him about it at the time, he told me that the listing of two guests on the receipt was a misprint: he had been there by himself, but had purchased multiple drinks.

"Don't you see?" I said, "I know you've been flirting with this woman who lives nearby. Then I see a receipt for drinks for two at a hotel? I just don't understand. Why do you act this way? I know you love me. I want to trust you, but when you flirt the way you do, it worries me. When I look at all of these things together, at everything that's happened since we've been together, and then find something like this, what am I supposed to think?" Maybe I said something else after that. I remember saying at some point that I need it all to stop. But those words -- what am I supposed to think -- are the last I remember saying before my world as I knew it fell apart, the wall hiding the truth crumbled and reality came rushing in at last.

"I think we need to call our friend and tell her we can't drive her to the airport tonight," said Mark. "Why?" I asked, trembling with anxiety at what I knew must be coming...

"Because I had sex with that woman."

That is when everything ended, and everything began.