Carlie Maree (31) from Australia was horrified when, last summer, she received a shocking email at work.
It was from a woman who was sleeping with her husband, and contained all sorts of intimate details about their relationship.
Carlie, who has a two-year-old daughter, split from her husband after learning of his infidelity.
Then, just recently, she did something she never thought she’d do. She finally wrote back to the woman who broke her heart.
“A year ago today you hit send on an email that had a monumental effect on several people’s lives,” Carlie wrote in a letter published on Mamamia.com.au.
In the letter, she explained how it wasn’t just her life that had been destroyed by the fallout. Then she questioned what made the woman send such an upsetting email.
“How much of it was revenge against a man who broke your heart and how much of it was you trying to do the right thing for his wife,” she wrote, explaining that it was the vivid details of their affair broke her heart.
She then accuses her of telling her what she would have to hear “to get her to the point of no return” in her marriage, delivering it “blow by blow.”
It’s not long before she starts pondering the extent to which motherhood changed her relationship with her husband.
“Sometimes I wonder how much of it was him trying to find what he had lost in me. I was once a cute blonde in a short skirt behind the bar at his favourite pub,” she wrote.
“Ten years later, I was the mum in the yoga pants with the silver regrowth and bags under her eyes from being up all night with a sick baby.”
Then she turns her anger on him.
“He was supposed to love that version of me too,” she wrote. “And he did, but he missed the girl who had nothing but time to dote on him. That’s what you gave him.”
“Just like the old cliché, you believed he would leave me for you. But he didn’t. He let you down. Our daughter got older, stopped nursing and started sleeping,” she wrote.
“He began to see the woman he had fallen in love with all those years ago.”
But their attempts to reconcile didn’t work, and Carlie and her husband split. Now he’s with neither her nor the other woman.
“We tried hard to put the pieces back together but it just didn’t work. I was different. It was the little details that did it. Those words and images etched into my mind. I think you knew that they would.
Incredibly, while she had to let out the pain of the past year, Carlie refuses to hold a grudge, and wants nothing more than to get on with her life.
“We are both ok now though, me and him,” she wrote. “I hope you have moved on with your life too.”
Wow. Such powerful words. You can read the letter in full here.
