When she says the words, ‘My fiancé cheated’, it still seems outrageous to Kim. She never suspected he might be having an affair – but when she discovered he was, she was doubly surprised by who it was with…
Welcome to our series, The Love Diaries – a space for you to share your experiences, advice, fairy-tale endings, setbacks and heartbreaks. We’ll be hearing from industry experts giving practical advice alongside Capsule readers (You!) sharing your firsthand experiences with love – from the woman who cheated on her husband with a work colleague, one woman’s temptation now the love of her life is finally single (although she’s not), and the woman who forced her husband to choose between her and his girlfriend.
Do you have a story you’d like to share? Send an email to alice@capsulenz.com!
The travel perks were one of the reasons Kim was keen to take the new job.
She and her fiancé Caleb had come back from their OE a year earlier, and her feet had been feeling itchy again. She missed being able to pop away for a weekend in France, or Germany, when their budget allowed it.
But this new job meant she’d be on a work trip to different cities in Australia at least every second month and at another big overseas destination once a year for a joint conference (the year before it had been held in Dubai).
The team seemed pretty nice – her boss seemed nice enough and she was maybe only five years older than her.
Three weeks into the job, she went with her boss, Jackie, to Sydney for three nights. They mostly did their own thing when they had free time, but her boss swiped her in with her to the business class lounge when it was time to head back. Then their flight got delayed, and again, until they’d been in the lounge drinking a fair few wines together.
“She told me that her and her fiancé were breaking up and it seemed like things were pretty messy,” says Kim. “It was that weird thing where she was trying to be professional because she’s my boss, but also, you just want to talk about what’s going on with you, right?”
Jackie kept a bit more distance from then on, but they were still friendly and warm to each other. There were a few people Kim got on well with in the office, but no one she was catching up with outside of work.
A year into the job, everything was going well. Kim was loving the job and liked that – even though it might just be Australia – she was getting some travel through her work. She and Caleb were trying to do one little holiday each year too – although, they were also trying to be careful with money. They’d already bought a house together when they’d returned from London and were trying to save for a wedding – and hopefully kids down the track.
Then one night, when Kim had an early flight the next morning to Adelaide, Jackie messaged and said she was coming down with the flu so wouldn’t be with her – she should take the lead and Kath, the junior, would come with her instead.
“I was sad for Jackie being sick, and a bit nervous, but it was exciting too,” says Kim. “It felt like a good opportunity to prove myself.”
The trip went well, and while Jackie accompanied her on the next one, the month after she suggested Kim just take Kath again, seeing as she did so well on the previous trip.
Over the next six months, Kim ended up going on five trips to Australia – four of them without Jackie.
On what would become her final trip, she and Kath were in Melbourne, when Kath got some sudden bad news from back home. They weren’t due home for another 36 hours, but Kim said she would get Kath home as soon as they possibly could. It was about 8pm at home in NZ, so Kim picked up her phone to call Jackie to let her know what was going on and see if she sort of changing Kath’s flights.
After a couple of rings, the call was answered… but it was Caleb on the other end.
“I was so confused, I was like, ‘what have I done’?” she says. “I thought, well, I must have called Caleb by mistake. I mean, I was stressed, it was quite a stressful situation so maybe I just called him without thinking. But then I, like, took the phone off my ear, and, no it had Jackie’s name on the call. So, I was wondering what the hell was going on.”
Why was Caleb answering Jackie’s phone?
When Kim asked this, Caleb immediately hung up. She called back, but there was no answer. She called Caleb’s phone, but there was no answer.
“At the time, I thought something had gone wrong with our phones,” she says. “And then I thought there must be some logical explanation for it.”
When Kim finally did get in touch with Caleb, he told her that Jackie had stopped by the house on her way home from the office to pick up a work laptop she thought was at their house. “I have no idea what that story is about, because there is no ‘spare laptop’?!” says Kim. “And then when Jackie saw my number ringing, she handed the phone over to Caleb, but then it must have died and ran out of battery at the moment. So… how come it didn’t go straight to voice mail? Caleb said his phone was in the other room so he didn’t hear me call.”
Kim says that the bizarre story suddenly made her suspicious.
“I honestly didn’t think anything bad was going on, until that story. It made no sense. I was like, ‘what’s really going on?’ but he acted all surprised, like I was crazy.”
Kim called Jackie, still needing to tell her about Kath’s emergency. But, of course, they discussed what had happened earlier.
“She laughed about it, like, what a funny situation that was,” says Kim. “I asked her how she knew where I lived and why she didn’t just call me to ask if I had an extra laptop. She said it was on my information where I lived, and she had called me – a lie. She said it happened quickly because the head of IT was really coming down on her about it.”
Her mind was reeling after she hung up – and she found herself looking through her emails for one from the head of IT. She quickly found it, and, despite it being 9pm at home, called his cellphone which was on his email signature.
“He must have been so confused,” says Kim. “I asked him if there was a missing laptop and they thought I might have it. He had absolutely no idea what I was talking about.”
Kim knew something very odd was going on – but Caleb wasn’t taking anything seriously. She was in another country, quietly losing her mind.
“I felt terrible too, because Kath had a real life or death situation going on, and my mind was elsewhere, spiraling,” she says.
In the end, she somehow got through the next few days and flew home. When she got home, Caleb denied anything was going on, until, he finally cracked and said yes, he’d been having an affair with Jackie – they’d had no idea until recently that Jackie was Kim’s boss.
“I was so angry,” says Kim. “I was screaming at him, and he was, like, very calm and almost clinical about it. Like, ‘I’m very sorry I’ve hurt you, it wasn’t my intention’ – but it all sounded so hollow and robotic.”
After thinking the situation through over and over again, Kim thinks she knows what happened with that strange call.
“He never admitted this, but what I believe happened was they had the same sort of phone – same black case, and both of them have the generic phone background your phone comes with. Wherever they were, her phone was next to him, but she might have been out of the room, or something. He must have seen my name come up on the screen and thought it was his phone and answered it.”
Jackie’s boss called Kim the next day – it was now the weekend, and Kim told him she intended to resign. She couldn’t bear working there. He made her a settlement offer, where she would get a payout – a rather generous one – for not revealing what happened with Jackie and why she wouldn’t be returning to work.
“It was enough money that it gave me options,” she says. “I had to make the decision quickly, which was so hard given the circumstances – my relationship was done. I didn’t have much time but I talked it over with my parents and my sister who were amazing.”
Kim took the offer and never returned to work.
“That was all eight years ago now,” says Kim. “I ran into someone I used to work with about a year ago and the told me there were all these rumours about why I left – one was that I had an affair with the big boss. I told her what happened – which I was surprised she didn’t know, because Caleb and Jackie got married a few years ago. From what I understood Jackie left the company pretty quickly too.”
Kim says the first few years after the split were incredibly hard.
“I never really got answers,” says Kim. “So, I overthought everything, trying to work it out myself. I think back to all that travel I was doing, that Jackie was sending me on in her place. That can’t have been a coincidence. She must have been sending me overseas, knowing Caleb would be home alone and they couldn’t be caught. When I rehashed it, yeah, then I could see patterns and times when he probably was cheating – he’d go to the gym after work. I’d work late sometimes – Jackie would have known when I was out at work events, ones that she’d mysteriously stopped going to. The whole thing makes me feel sick. ”
Kim ended up taking three months off working and then found a new job.
“My rebound job wasn’t great and it made me sadder,” she says. “But a few years later I got a great job I loved, and the best part was, I met my husband through that job. He didn’t work for the same company, but I met him through work. He’s a great guy and he knows what happened in my past and has been so kind about it and is always reassuring me and being very open about things. I’m now halfway through my first pregnancy – we’re very excited to be parents.”
As far as she’s aware, Caleb and Jackie are still together.
“We still live in the same city and I’ve never seen either of them in the last eight years, which is odd,” she says. “I have no idea what I’d say to them, but, what I’d most like to do is just ignore them and walk past them. They’re not worth my time.”
