The First Fourteen Days

You found out. Now you have to get to Thursday.

Nobody prepares you for the first two weeks. Not for the four seconds between waking up and remembering. Not for the middle of the night, when the mind produces enormous conclusions and none of them survive daylight. Not for the moment on day seven when somebody who loves you asks, kindly, what you are going to do - and you have no idea, and the not-knowing feels like failure.

This is a book for those fourteen days. Only those.

It is written in short pages, because after news like this the concentration goes and a long chapter is useless. Each of the fourteen days has twenty pages that follow the shape of a real day: waking up, the middle of the day, what to say when somebody asks, the evening, and a page written specifically for three in the morning.

WHAT THIS BOOK WILL NOT DO

It will not tell you to leave. It will not tell you to stay. Not once, not by implication, not in the last chapter. Whether this relationship continues is not a stranger's decision, and any book that claims otherwise is telling you about its author, not about you.

It will not promise that you will feel better by day fourteen. Some people do. Some feel worse, because the shock has worn off and the shock was carrying some of the weight. Both are ordinary.

It will not label your partner, quote research at you, or invent case studies. It will not tell you how to check a phone or an account - searching feels like control and reliably makes the next hour worse. And it will never suggest that a person who was loved enough would not have gone looking.

INSIDE

- Fourteen days, twenty short pages each, in the order a day actually happens

- A page for the middle of the night in every single day

- Ready-made sentences for when somebody asks and your voice will not work

- "If you have to work today" and "If there are other people in the house" - every day

- The index of hard hours: turn straight to "I cannot stop picturing it", "everyone is asking what I am going to do", "I still want them and I am ashamed of it"

- Plain guidance on the difference between a doctor, a counsellor, a couples therapist and a support line - and how to make the first call

- A clear, unhurried section on when a situation is not only an affair, and what to do about that first

- Room to write, on the days when writing helps, and blank when it does not

A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR

Marren Ostby is a writer, not a therapist, a physician, or a lawyer, and the book says so on the first page rather than implying otherwise. Where a professional is needed, this book points to one instead of standing in for one.

FOR THE READER WHO CANNOT MAKE A DECISION YET

The pressure to resolve this will come from every direction, and the easiest relief at any moment will be to say one sentence and end the uncertainty. This book exists so that you do not have to. Two weeks of holding the line - so that whatever you eventually decide, you decide it rested, in a different month, on what you actually think.