It was while on holiday, in a bed and breakfast, that Mark Daniel told his wife of 18 years about the six affairs he’d had during their first seven years of marriage.
The couple’s daughters, then aged nine and 11, were in the next room.
‘When Mark said: “There’s something I need to tell you,” I thought he was about to say he had a terminal illness,’ recalls Christine at their home in Northumberland. They sit close together, looking at each other as they speak, one picking up when the other trails off.
‘We talked late into the night,’ she continues. ‘It was devastating. I’d had no idea. The sense of betrayal was vast. I was deeply hurt and angry.’
If Mark’s revelation in 2003 on their holiday in South Africa was like a bomb going off, the one that came next, that Christine had had an affair too — a one-night stand — was a second damaging strike at the heart of the marriage.
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