My husband cheated on me with our son's wife — our response was brutal
My husband cheated on me with our son's wife — our response was brutal.
My name is Carys. I am fifty-six. I have been married to Gerry for thirty-one years.
Three months ago our son Elis married Beth. It was a beautiful day. He was lit up with it. I cried all the way through.
And then Gerry started working late. Coming in smelling of somebody else. Turning his phone over.
And I told myself I was imagining it, because after thirty-one years you do not look sideways at the man asleep beside you.
And on the Thursday a message came up on the tablet we share.
From B.
***Tonight at 8. Same place. Elis is on nights.***
And everything in me went cold.
That evening I followed him. I sat in my car across from a hotel on the other side of Caerdy with my hands going on the wheel.
And at seven minutes past eight, Beth's white car came in.
And ten minutes after that my husband came out of that lobby with his arm round her waist.
Our son's wife.
And I took a photograph. And then a video.
And I did not scream and I did not cry. Something in me went completely quiet.
And my father's voice came up in my head, the way it does: That man will let you down one day, Carys.
And I rang Elis from that car park.
"Mam?" He was cheerful. "All right?"
"Elis. Come to your grandad's grave. Now. I'll meet you there. I'm going to show you something and tell you everything. And then we're going to do something about it."
"Mam, you're frightening me."
"Just come, love."
And I put the phone down and started the engine and drove to Bryn Awel.
What my son said at that grave.
He got there about four minutes after me.
And I had the phone in my hand and I had worked out, in the car, exactly how I was going to do it — slowly, sitting down, with my arm round him.
And he came up that path and he looked at my face and he said: "I know, Mam."
And I said what.
And he said: "I know. I've known since September."
Five weeks.
My son had known for five weeks and had been coming to Sunday dinner, and had sat at my table on the twenty-eighth of September next to his father, and had asked me about the greenhouse.
Why he had not told me.
Because he was trying to work out how.
That is what he said at that grave and I did not believe it for about four seconds, and then I did, because he was twenty-nine and his face was wrecked and he had clearly not slept properly since the September.
He had found out on the fourth of September. He will not tell me how and he does not have to.
And he said he had got as far as my kitchen twice. Once on the fourteenth and once on the twenty-first, and both times he had sat there for an hour and talked about the car and gone home.
And then he said the thing that took the floor out.
He said: "And I didn't know what you'd do. Because of 2009."
2009.
My husband had an affair in 2009 with a woman called Sian Wreford who worked at the depot.
It went on about eleven months and I found out in the October of that year and I stayed.
And I have never once discussed it with my son.
Not in 2009, when he was thirteen. Not in 2010. Not at any point in fifteen years.
It was handled, as my mother would have said. There was a fortnight when I did not speak and then there was a Sunday when I did, and then there were about four years of it being slowly put away, and by about 2015 I could not have told you the woman's surname without thinking.
And the eleven months in 2009, which I have put in one line and which I have never described to a single person.
I found out on the fourth of October, 2009, and I did not say anything until the eighteenth.
Fourteen days. The same shape. I have only just seen that, writing this down, and I have had to stop for a bit.
And what happened on the eighteenth is that I said four sentences in a kitchen and he cried and it was over by the following Sunday.
No solicitor. No separation. Nobody told. My mother did not know and she was alive until 2016.
And Elis was thirteen and he was upstairs for both of those conversations, and I have always assumed he had his headphones on.
He did not have headphones in 2009. We got him those for Christmas in 2010. I have the receipt because I keep everything, and I found it in the March of this year looking for something else, and I sat on the floor of the loft with it.
So the thing I have told myself for fifteen years — that he was upstairs with his music on — is not possible.
On the eighteenth of October, 2009, a boy of thirteen was in a bedroom at the top of a staircase with nothing in his ears while his mother and father had that conversation in the kitchen below.
And in the May of 2011 he said nine words to me going up those same stairs.
And I have spent fourteen years believing he found out somehow, from somewhere, in 2010.
What Elis knew.
He found out in the spring of 2010, when he was fourteen.
He has never told me how and he will not, and I have stopped asking.
And what he has carried since he was fourteen is not that his father did it.
It is that his mother knew and stayed and never mentioned it, ever, to anybody, in front of him, for fifteen years.
And at that grave, at about nine o'clock at night on the ninth of October, 2025, my son said: "I didn't know if you'd want to do anything. I thought you might just — do what you did last time."
And I said: "This is different."
And he said: "Why?"
And I could not answer him.
I have had fourteen months and I have an answer now and it is not a good one, which is: because last time it was a woman at the depot, and this time it was in my family and everybody was going to find out.
What we did.
We went to Beth's parents.
Friday morning, the tenth of October, at twenty past nine, at Ruth and Howell Tolland's kitchen table in Caerdy, with my phone.
And I played them the video.
Eleven seconds. My husband and their daughter coming out of the Ninian with his arm round her.
Ruth Tolland is sixty-one and she had made us tea before she knew what we were there for, and she was still holding the pot.
And there was about four seconds of nothing and then she made a noise that I have not been able to get out of my head since, and her husband took the phone off me and watched it twice.
And then Howell Tolland, who is a quiet man of sixty-three who has never in his life said a sharp word to me, said: "Does Beth know you're here?"
And I said no.
And he said: "Then why have you come to us before her?"
And I did not have an answer to that either.
And Elis in that kitchen, who I have had sitting silently beside me and who said three words the whole time.
He said hello to Ruth at the door, and then he said nothing for about nine minutes.
And at the end, when Howell asked why we had come to them before Beth, and I had no answer, Elis said: "I'm sorry."
To them. Not to me and not about me — to his wife's parents, in their kitchen, for having been brought there.
And then he went out and sat in the car.
And I stayed another four minutes, which I have never mentioned to him, and in those four minutes I said two more things to Ruth Tolland that were not necessary.
I told her that it had started four weeks after the wedding.
And I told her the name of the hotel.
Neither of those was in the video and neither of them changed anything that Ruth Tolland needed to know.
I said them because she was still standing there holding a teapot and had not yet said anything to me, and I wanted her to.
And she did. She sat down.
And then I went out to the car, where my son was, and he did not ask me what had kept me, and I did not tell him.
Why we went to them first.
Because they were the people it would do the most to.
That is the sentence and it took a woman called Nuala and about nine months.
Gerry already knew what he had done. There was nothing to tell him.
Beth already knew what she had done.
The only people in Caerdy who did not know, and whose lives could be reorganised by eleven seconds of video, were a retired couple of sixty-one and sixty-three who had put on a wedding in the July and had their daughter's picture on the wall in that kitchen.
I drove to that house at twenty past nine in the morning because I wanted somebody to feel what I had felt in a car park.
And Elis came with me and I let him, which is the part I will answer for.
He was twenty-nine and he had not slept since the fourth of September and his mother said come with me and he came.
The night before, which I have given one line to and which was eleven hours.
I did not go home from Bryn Awel.
Elis and I sat in his car in that cemetery car park until about half eleven, and then we went to his flat, and we were up until four.
And what we did in those hours is plan it.
Properly. On paper. He had a notebook from work and we went through it like a job.
Who, in what order, on what day. We had five names on that list and we did them in the order of damage, and I was the one who worked out the order.
Ruth and Howell were first because of the morning — because Beth was at work until four on the Friday and would not know we had been.
I thought of that. At about two in the morning, in my son's kitchen, with a cup of tea: that if we went at twenty past nine, her parents would have the whole day with it before she got home.
And Elis wrote it down.
And then at about four I said we should sleep, and he slept on the sofa and I was in his spare room, and at about half five I heard him get up and go into the bathroom and run the tap for a long time.
And I did not get up.
I lay in that bed and listened to my son being sick through a wall, with a list in the next room in his handwriting, and I thought: he will be all right once it is done.
What happened after.
It went through that town in about three days.
Not from me. I did not put anything anywhere and I have never shown that video to another living soul.
It went because Ruth Tolland rang her sister, which anybody would.
Gerry moved to his brother's on the Saturday. He did not argue and he has not argued since and he signed what he was given in the March.
Beth moved out of the flat on the eleventh and went to her parents and then, in the November, to Bryncoed.
They are divorced. It took until the June because of the flat.
And Elis is living in it on his own and he is not all right, and he has been signed off twice, and he is seeing somebody on Thursdays, which I pay for and which he did not want me to.
And the four remaining names on that list, which we never got to and which I have never told Elis I am glad about.
After Ruth and Howell there was Gerry's brother, and then his mother, who is eighty-four and in a home at Caerdy and who does not always know who I am.
And then two people from the depot, which was mine and not his, and which was about 2009 and not about 2025, and I knew that while I was writing it down.
We did not do any of them, because by the Monday there was nothing left to tell anybody. Ruth rang her sister and the town did the rest in three days.
And I have let Elis believe that we stopped because we decided to stop.
We did not decide anything. We were overtaken.
If that town had been slower, I would have gone to a home at Caerdy with a video on a telephone and shown it to a woman of eighty-four.
It was on a list in my son's handwriting, fourth, and I put it there at about three in the morning.
And in the June, Elis said something about how we had at least kept it off Nan.
And I said: "Yes. Well."
And he let it go, because he is kind, and because by the June he had already worked out more about his mother than he wanted to.
Beth.
She was twenty-seven.
And I have said that out loud perhaps four times in fourteen months and I have never once put it next to the other number.
Gerry is fifty-eight.
She met my son when she was twenty-four and she met my husband in the same month, at a barbecue in our garden, in the June of 2022.
And it started in the August of 2025, four weeks after the wedding, which I know because it came out in the autumn, and I know roughly how it started and I am not going to set it out.
What I will say is that there is not one version of those four weeks in which a man of fifty-eight is not the one who moved first.
I have known that since about the November of 2025.
And in fourteen months, in every room where this has been discussed — and there have been a great many, because Caerdy is small — I have let the word she do all the work.
***She* did it to my son. She came into my house. She sat at my table in a white dress.**
And every woman in that town who has put a hand on my arm about it has gone away talking about a twenty-seven-year-old.
Which is exactly where I wanted it, because the alternative is a sentence about my husband that I have been not saying since 2009.
And Ruth Tolland, who wrote to me in the February and who I have not answered.
Two pages. And she is not vicious in it, which would have been easier.
She says she is not asking me to feel sorry for Beth and that she does not expect me to.
And then she says one thing that I have read about forty times.
She says: You sat in my kitchen in the May and we did the flowers for four hours.
The May. The twelfth of May, 2025, two months before that wedding. Her kitchen, her table, two of us, four hours and about nine hundred sprigs of something.
And on the tenth of October I came back to that same table at twenty past nine in the morning with a phone in my hand.
She does not say it as an accusation. She says it in a list of other things, the way you do when you are trying to work out how something happened.
And what I have never been able to do is answer her, because the honest answer is that I remembered that kitchen while I was choosing where to go.
Not afterwards. At about two in the morning, with Elis's notebook open, I pictured that table.
And it was a reason to pick it, not a reason to pick somewhere else.
What I have not done.
I have not said one word in public about Gerry Dunmow.
That is a remarkable thing when you look at it, and nobody has ever noticed, including my sister.
Fourteen months, and I have been angry at Beth Tolland in front of about forty people, and at that town, and at myself once or twice late at night.
And what I have said about my husband of thirty-one years, out loud, to anybody, is: "Well. There you are."
That is it. That is the whole of it.
Because the moment I start on him properly, it does not stop at 2025. It goes back to 2009, and then I am a woman who stayed for fifteen years with somebody who did it twice, and then every person in Caerdy who has been sorry for me has to re-sort me into something else.
So I have kept it on her. Deliberately, carefully, for fourteen months, with a great deal of skill.
And the eleven seconds, which I watched in that car park before I rang anybody.
I watched it four times.
And then I stopped, and I did something that I have never admitted to and that Nuala got out of me in the August.
I zoomed in. On her.
Not on him. On a twenty-seven-year-old's face coming out of a hotel lobby, and I held it there, and what I was looking for is the thing I have been pretending ever since that I did not find.
She is not enjoying herself.
It is eleven seconds of bad footage across a road at night and I am not going to pretend it is evidence of anything a court would look at.
But I know what a face does, and I sat in that car at twenty past eight on the ninth of October and I looked at that girl's face for about a minute, and then I put the phone down and rang my son.
And in the fourteen months since, I have shown that video to two people and described it to about forty, and every single time I have described what my husband's arm was doing.
I have never once described her face.
I saw it first. Before Ruth, before the town, before any of it, in a car, on my own.
And I decided inside about a minute that it was not going to be part of the story.
What my father said.
***That man will let you down one day, Carys.***
I put it in at the top of this and it is the line everybody remembers.
My father said it in 1993, before the wedding, in his shed.
And I have been quoting it for fourteen months as a prophecy.
It was a warning. There is a difference and it is the whole difference.
He said it to me when I could still have done something about it, in a shed, holding a chisel, badly, the way men of that generation say things — and I told him he did not know Gerry and that he would come round.
And then I drove to his grave in 2025 and used his sentence as the thing that made me right.
He is not in this story. He died in 2014 and he never knew about 2009, because I did not tell him, because I could not bear for him to have been correct while he was alive.
I took his warning and kept it from him and then came back eleven years after he died to collect on it.
And the fourteen days before the Thursday, which I have described as telling myself I was imagining it.
I was not imagining it. I had been certain since the twenty-sixth of September.
That is a Friday and there was a receipt in a coat and it was not ambiguous and I knew what it was inside about four seconds.
And I put it back in the pocket.
Thirteen days.
And in those thirteen days I did three things that I have never put in any version of this.
I had my hair done, on the first of October, which I had not done since the wedding.
I went through the house valuation that had been sitting in a drawer since the spring, on the fourth, at the kitchen table, with a calculator.
And on the seventh I rang my sister in Bryncoed and asked her, in a roundabout way that she did not pick up on at the time, how long her spare room would be free for.
So the woman sitting in a car outside the Ninian on the ninth of October with her hands going on the wheel had already been to the hairdresser, done the sums on the house, and checked where she could sleep.
I have told this as a woman whose world came apart on a Thursday evening.
My world came apart on the twenty-sixth of September in a hallway, with a coat in my hand, and I spent the next thirteen days getting ready and not saying one word to anybody — including to my son, who had already been carrying it for three weeks.
And the last thing.
There is one thing at that grave I have never told anybody and it is why I have written all of this down.
Elis asked me a question.
After 2009 came up, and after I said this is different, and after he said why and I could not answer.
He stood there for a bit and then he said: "Mam. Did you know in 2009 that I knew?"
And I said no.
And that is the lie.
I knew in the May of 2011.
He was fifteen and there was an argument about something completely unrelated — a phone, I think — and he said something at the end of it, going up the stairs, that he could only have said if he knew.
Nine words. And then a door.
And I stood at the bottom of those stairs and I had a choice, and what I did was go into the kitchen and put the radio on.
Fourteen years.
He went up those stairs at fifteen having just told his mother, in the only way a boy of fifteen can, that he was carrying it — and his mother turned the radio on, and never raised it, and he has never been able to raise it either, because the signal he got at the bottom of those stairs was that it was not to be raised.
And then in the October of 2025 he found out about his wife and his father and he could not come to me for five weeks, and I have been telling everybody that it is because he is a kind boy who did not want to hurt me.
He could not come to me because I taught him not to, on a staircase, in the May of 2011, in about four seconds.
And at that grave he gave me one more go at it. He asked me straight out.
And I said no.
And he nodded, and we stood there for a bit, and then we drove to Ruth and Howell Tolland's house the next morning and did something brutal to two people who had never done anything to anybody.
I have not corrected it since. He is twenty-nine and he is not sleeping and he goes to somebody on Thursdays, and every week there is a version of this in which I ring him and say: Elis. I knew. I've known since 2011.
May you like
It is eleven words.
And I have had fourteen months and I have not said them, and I know exactly why, and it is the same reason I turned the radio on.
