Dear Emily,

I have kept a deep secret all these years: I had a love child a few months after my husband left for abroad to work as a seaman.

We were newly married then and when he left, I decided to work for a classmate in the province. She was an only child who had her own business, and just lost both her parents in an accident.

We had been very close since we were 5, and considered each other sisters, me being an only child myself. She needed a manager to look after her business, as she was traveling constantly.   I told my husband this job would help us financially, so he allowed me to move to the province.

Then, I met this guy through our business. He was so kind and soft-spoken, I fell in love with him right away. I got pregnant soon after and my friend didn’t pass any judgment. Since it was a small town, she sent me away to a really close friend of hers in the south, where I gave birth. 

When my husband came home for vacation after three years, I introduced the child to him as my classmate’s and my “adopted” son because of how close he has gotten to me. His mother was constantly away, and I’d become his “surrogate” mother, I said.  

Somehow my being an only child, and my husband being adopted himself, has worked well for our psyches. Nobody suspected anything. My guilt, however, has been tugging at my conscience. Should I or shouldn’t I confess to my indiscretion?

WICKED WIFE

You can never change the past, so you might as well accept it at this late stage. You don’t seem to regret this love child anyway, except for your guilt, and it’s just as well.

Children, in or out of marriages, should never bear the brunt of a parent’s infidelity.  They’re innocent of the fact and shouldn’t be made to suffer the consequences.

Did anybody die because of your deed? Was anybody hurt physically? Not now, but emotionally, in the future, perhaps, when the truth begins to unravel.  Nothing stays secret in this life,  after all.

Let the heavens be your judge. Nobody would know its judgment but you. As it is, it’s your conscience that is exacting a toll on you with the guilt you’re suffering.

Why ease your load and come clean to him about the child? Bear it alone, instead of transferring the misery to your husband and making him suffer your indiscretion his whole life for it. That will be like thrusting a knife in his heart! And that, would really be unfair.

So what if you’ve been telling the whole world a white lie all this time—would anybody care? Let sleeping dogs lie.  If anyone should suffer, it should only be one person: You.

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