I have an all-powerful junk email filter.
Not much gets past it, as long as it's in English. If my inbox doesn't recognize you, and you come from a major web-based email domain, well, you're probably not getting into my inbox. And so your email will spill into junk mail.
Which presents its own problem, in that I end up with tons of junk mail. I normally go through it every 2 weeks or so. But during the divorce, I hadn't checked it for months. I had been otherwise occupied with treading water until D moved out, and until the divorce could be finalized.
On November 16, I sent D an important email regarding some legal paperwork with respect to Little One. I needed his feedback before I could have my lawyer issue a revised parenting plan. And so I had emailed him. He was usually pretty good about responding, however this time around, I didn't hear back from him. One hour stretched into two, and then three. I suppose I could have called him, honestly. But my brain suddenly thought, hey, he's using a pretty new email address, and I'm not sure he's ever emailed me at work with it. I should probably check my junk mail.
And so I clicked on the Junk Email folder in my inbox, and sorted the items there - thousands of them, thanks to my lack of attention for months - by sender. Then I hit "d" to see if I could find an email from D.
Well, there was an email from D. But, presumably, it was not from him. Because upon opening it, here's what I found:
From: d_is_having_an_affair [husbandishavinganaffair@gmail.com]
Sent: Sunday, September 13 8:18 AM
To: Penelope
Subject: Re: this is difficult to say
but i know you, and i know d. he is having an affair. he is using you.
Wait.
What?
You have got to be shitting me.
Who the hell would create an email account called "husbandishavinganaffair@gmail.com"? The possibilities flooded my head. D himself? Sally, scorned by D's rejection in light of our agreement that we not date anyone until after he moved out? Sally's husband, who was apparently quite a dickhead (to hear D talk about him)? A concerned co-friend of me and D? Gasp - a total stranger?
Creepy. Who thought my husband was having an affair? Who would have the knowledge of something like that?
Then I noticed that this email was dated September 13. Nearly two months ago.
And then I figured - aha! This is someone who knows about the text message thing from late August, and wanted to tell me. How nice of them. But seeing as how D and I had already worked out that Sally was out of the picture until he moved out, and this email was sent well after that, well, this was obviously irrelevant, dated information. And so, therefore, wrong.
So I figured I'd write back, with forced nonchalance, and say, Thanks, whatever:
From: Penelope
Sent: Monday, November 16 11:26 AM
To: d_is_having_an_affair [husbandishavinganaffair@gmail.com]
Subject: RE: this is difficult to say
Um…thanks. Not sure who you are, but I just found this now. The divorce papers were filed at the end of September. Either way, I appreciate your letting me know, and this is not a surprise. :-)
But I was shaking as I hit "Send." What if, I thought. What if?
Now I wanted to know who this person was, who would take it upon themselves to send me an email like this, and what their motivation could possibly be. But, I reasoned, it had been more than two months since I'd actually received the email. Certainly, by now, the person who had sent it had given up on me responding. What if my response languished out there on the cloud for months, too? I had to figure out a way to let them know I'd responded.
So I went into gmail.com, and I attempted to log in to the husbandishavinganaffair account. When it didn't let me, I told it I wanted it to generate a new password for me. It said it would send the new password to my primary email account on file - a separate account set up by the email's creator, and used as the "mother account" on Google. So I hit "Send email."
Ping.
There, I thought. That ought to get their attention. Who might they be? This person emailed me at my work email. That's only known to...oh yeah, everyone in the not very small company I work for. Crap, that was a dead end. But it did at least narrow the playing field a bit, since not many people outside of work had that email address.
But then it occurred to me that I might be opening a giant can of worms.
What if this person knew a lot...a lot that I don't know if I want to know?
Oh God. What if I had been wrong the entire time? What if D actually was that duplicitous?
Oh, shit.
Initiate nausea sequence in 5...4...3...2...
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