Secret Revealed: How a Baby Unexpectedly Changed Everything About a Hidden Romance
“Until this little miracle came along, we had actually started talking about whether it was time to stop hooking up on the side and go our separate ways,” said Whitfeld, who attempted to soothe the crying newborn daughter he held in one arm while using his free hand to text his wife and tell her he was working late again and wouldn’t be home for dinner. “Infidelity isn’t easy, and I know I haven’t always been as committed to this affair as I should have been. But now that Arden and I have started a secret family together, that’s all going to change.”
“I want to build a future that we hide from everyone we know with her,” he added.
Whitfeld said he was excited to spend more time with the baby just as soon as he could fabricate a story about a work trip to St. Louis and stay over at Sullivan’s apartment for a few days. He spoke of how he had teared up a bit the night he first laid the infant down to sleep and realized her crib stood on the same rug where he and Sullivan had once had hasty intercourse during their lunch hour.
According to Sullivan, the affair began to lose its luster about a year ago, when it felt as though she and Whitfeld were simply going through the motions of deceiving the people around them so they could meet up for casual sex. She observed that having a baby had raised the stakes of their clandestine encounters by giving them so much more to keep hidden from the world.
“For a while there, things between us had gotten pretty bad, and I’ll admit I thought about moving on and finding another married man to sleep with,” said Sullivan, adding that to outsiders it might have looked like a picture-perfect affair, because she and Whitfeld had “the whole package”: coworkers who stayed out of their business, no mutual friends, and believable alibis. “But what I’ve learned is that cheating takes work. And I have to hand it to Greg. He’s promised to be there for me and the baby every time he tells his wife he’s at the gym.”
