After the shocking betrayal dream, I realized how easy it would have been for him to play around to his heart's content with as many women as he wanted, I felt Tom had played me for a fool and a chump. He had taken advantage of my trust in him in a way that was unconscionable and despicable. I was so outraged that I was barely able to function normally. The man I had once loved, I now struggled not to hate. Many pictures of a smiling Tom ended up cut to pieces in the trash. Things of his I had cherished were thrown out in anger. Nothing helped. The phrase if he wasn’t dead, I’d kill him was my constant refrain.

A month before his shocking confession, an old and very close friend of ours had passed away, and I had immediately gotten tickets to fly back for her memorial service in October. Now, as furious as I was, I almost didn’t go back. Forget it. I didn't want to see our old friends and be reminded of our past life together which now seemed a shameful fraud. I didn't think any of these friends knew about his betrayals, but I didn't care. I hated anything that had anything to do with Tom O'Rourke.

I kept asking myself was I as dumb as it now seemed I had been? No, I realized my anger had overwhelmed my good sense. I had to have a little confidence in myself. As I remembered how Tom suffered and died, I realized that I was only thinking of myself, my hurt. He was obviously much more hurt, may have been actually been destroyed by the failure of our marriage. I knew I had to figure this out.

As the date of the memorial service for our old friend approached, I was reminded of the near-death experience of the Dr. Tony Cicoria who was struck by lightning and commented, “It’s all so orchestrated.” Tom has told me his dreadful secret with just enough time before the memorial service so that I will get over the most violent of emotions and be able to attend and reconnect with our old life and friends. All so orchestrated.

As I took my journey to revisit my old haunts in New Jersey, celebrating the life of probably our dearest old friend, it was so clear that our lives are very carefully orchestrated. Just as I was ready to write Tom off as a terrible mistake in my life and myself as a fool, I went back to the memorial service and saw all our longtime friends. The friend who'd passed away had been at our wedding; her husband had done our wedding photos. And they all loved Tom, and they loved me. So many of our treasured friends were there. It was all orchestrated to remind me, as nothing else could have done so effectively, that Tom was not a terrible mistake in my life. He was not a jerk and neither was I.

We'd had a good and long-lasting marriage and a life full of meaning and shared good times. I came back a new person, still very hurt and baffled, but my faith that something had been right about our marriage was restored. Many of our friends are fellow actors or in the biz, and they had families and marriages of long standing, so Tom had not rejected the idea of happy marriages. He enjoyed his friends and watching their children grow up, as he seemed to enjoy our marriage and watching our son grown up.

It was imperative, if I wanted to keep my sanity, to figure out how I’d spend over three decades thinking I was happily married, while my husband cheated on me. The biggest mystery was why. He’d always professed himself to be happily married, and thought he was an actor, nobody is that good. He couldn’t have faked happiness for thirty-five years.

Trying to solve the riddle of who he really was, I delved into every psychology book and article that might provide some understanding of why he lived a double life. Because of his difficult childhood, I poured over books about children of alcoholic parents, abused children, borderline personality disorder and all sorts of clinical discussions to try to understand who he really was.

But clinical explanations only get you so far. He was a human being, a person I lived with and interacted with every day for decades. Psychological generalizations were not enough to explain how Tom could profess deepest love, yet angrily and exultantly chase other women every chance he got.

Once I suspected the truth about Tom’s extramarital activities, a thousand recollections of suspicious encounters with women flooded my mind. Looking back, there were several emotionally upsetting personal and career events that had left me puzzled, which I now reexamined to see what might have really been going on.

If I was ever to solve the mystery of what the dreams and paranormal events were trying to tell me, I had to figure out the truth about Tom’s half of our marriage. There must be clues in the events of our marriage to give some insight into what had really been going on, who he’d been involved with, and what his secret motives had been. Every time I thought I’d gotten to the bottom of the problem, new messages would come through, forcing me to go deeper into the profound connections between our bodies, our minds, and our souls.

It is only by looking at some of these events in our life that I began to rewrite the real story of our marriage: Tom’s secret story.