'I was making my daughter pancakes, when she said something that made me realise my husband was having an affair…'

By Alice Hampson

Lisa had the perfect marriage.

Things had just seemed to have fallen into place from the moment she met her husband, Pete, when they were both 25.

They'd gone flatting, done an overseas exchange together, moved back home, bought a house, got engaged, got married, had two children…

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"It was all just so easy," says Lisa. "I used to think about that all the time. My friends all had things to go through that were hard – like, heartbreaks and dating dramas, or these really hard journeys to have children. I'd feel guilty about it sometimes, like, everything just happened so easily and naturally for us."

She really felt that her marriage was strong and that she and Pete would be together in the retirement village. They'd had a bit of a test, just purely from having children so close to one another – they had Irish twins, with their second child being born two days before their firstborn's first birthday.

"If anyone needs proof or reminding that you can get pregnant while you're breastfeeding and having had your first period after childbirth, let this be it!" she says.

Time was something they never seemed to have enough of, and juggling everything left them both exhausted. "We didn't have enough in the tank to give each other the way we used to," says Lisa. But, she'd often remind herself that they had two under four in the house (or, for a couple of days there, remarkably, two under one!).

But, as things were ramping up towards Christmas in 2024, Lisa's world was tipped on its head – after one of her daughters made a casual comment to her.

"It was a Saturday and Pete was away, which we were all feeling a bit sad about, so I asked her if I could make her something special for breakfast," she says. "I suggested pancakes and she said yes, so I immediately started whipping some up."

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But then, her daughter followed it up by saying something a little odd.

"She said, 'I want you to make them like Aunty Kate's pancakes," says Lisa.

The odd part was, that there is no Aunty Kate in their lives.

Lisa began trying to work out what her daughter might mean – keeping in mind that four-year-olds can quite often get the wrong end of the stick or send you on a wild goose chase with their descriptions of things.

"I was asking her where she had these pancakes, and she said in our house," says Lisa. "I looked through the cupboard to see if our pancake mixture had something on it that looked like something to do with an aunty or Kate."

But when she showed her daughter the box she said no, Aunty Kate didn't use a pancake mix.

"She said she used flour and stuff, and put blueberries in it," says Lisa. "I think at the time I thought it was kind of a funny mystery, like it would be that one of her kindy teachers did this and she was getting mixed up."

But then, she asked her daughter to describe what this Kate woman looked like.

She began describing a tall woman with dark curly hair. Lisa's youngest jumped in and said yes, she had a sparkly top and she "slept in mummy and daddy's room".

Lisa was starting to feel disturbed. She did know a Kate – a Kate who was tall and had long dark curly hair. She worked with her husband.

Lisa wracked her brain, then asked her daughters if Aunty Kate came to stay when Mummy went to visit Aunty Lucy. About a month earlier, Lisa's younger sister had her first baby and was having some trouble, so she had gone down to stay with her for a weekend.

"They said yes," says Lisa. "They said it was when Mummy came home with a baby for them, which was right, I bought them each a little doll for while I was away."

Still, Lisa hoped there might be some sort of logical explanation for it. Maybe they went out for breakfast and ran into Kate. Maybe for some reason Kate dropped off something while they were making pancakes and suggested they put blueberries in them.

It gnawed at her though. Her husband was away on a fishing trip for a stag do – she waited until the afternoon she took her daughters over to her parents house for a swim, to call him. She let it ring once, then hung up, then waited five or so seconds and called back – it was a little system she and Pete had that let them know it was urgent and they needed to pick up, no matter what was happening.

He missed the call but immediately called back. Pete asked if everything was okay.

"I said, 'not really,' she says, "'I'd like to understand why Kate stayed the night in our bed and made our daughters pancakes while I was visiting my sister." She thought she was saying it with a touch of humour, as though the idea was preposterous and their preschoolers were telling tall tales again.

But, immediately Pete sighed and said, "Oh sh-t."

"I felt like the world tilted," says Lisa. "A lot of blood must have rushed into my head because I could hear it loudly pulsing, like swooshing through my ears."

Then her husband, in a hushed tone said something like, "Look, sh-t, I'm really sorry, I was planning on telling you after Christmas, I didn't want you to find out like this…"

Lisa says she actually has very little recollection of what happened next, but she must have got enough information to know that yes, Pete had been having an affair, and, shockingly, he was planning on leaving Lisa to be with her.

"At the time, I was just too in shock," says Lisa. "I must have called out for Mum and at first she thought I'd got news that Pete was dead or something, but I must have got out what happened. I'm really lucky I was at their house so they could look after the girls – and me."

Lisa says it took a while for the shock to wear off and then the anger really set in.

"The stuff about him not wanting me to find out about like that, only from him… what bullsh-t," she says. "He SO obviously wanted to be caught. I mean, I still can't get over the fact he brought her into our home, with our children. It still makes my blood boil. I haven't got over that part at all. I don't know if I ever will."

Lisa stayed with her parents for a week, until Pete had moved out of their home. Lisa and the girls moved back in, although the house is now up for sale, as Lisa looks for a smaller home for her and the girls. Pete has the girls every other weekend.

"I hate that I have this mental picture of them all eating blueberry pancakes together like some stupid rom-com family movie," she says.

"It has been so humbling and so incredibly awful," says Lisa. "The last year and a bit has felt like a bad dream. I really thought I had this perfect, easy little life and it had been completely set on fire, like it was never real to begin with. It has been incredibly difficult to come to terms with."

Lisa says she's spent the last year putting one foot in front of the other, but feels like she is starting to come out of the haze of it all now.

"I thought Christmas was going to be dreadful," she says. "I barely remember last Christmas and I thought this one was going to feel really sad, but it didn't. We went down to my sister's house and spent it with her and her husband and son and it was all really lovely and the girls had a great time."

Whilst there, she caught up with another friend who said something that stuck with her. "She's divorced now too and she said to me, at least I've found out now," she says. "The truth was that Pete was a cheat – he may have said he was going to tell me after Christmas, but he was also a coward, I could still be with him, unaware of his cheating.

"'The earlier you find out the truth, the sooner you can start healing,' she said to me. Something about that stuck – like, this was always going to happen. There was always going to have to be something hard that came along in my life and this is it, it's turned up. But I'm still young, there are still so many more possibilities ahead of me in this life."

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