My Wife Said She Stopped Talking to Her Ex but His Name Still Lights Up Her Phone Every Night at 11PM

I knew about Callum. She’d dated him for four years before me, starting from her second year of university. Long relationship, ended when he moved for a job in another city and it just didn’t hold together the distance. She mentioned him occasionally without it being a thing. I’d asked once in a kind of early-relationship checking-in way whether she was still in touch with him and she said they’d talked a few times but not really, it faded out. I said okay.

The 11pm calls started — or I noticed them starting — in maybe October. I noticed because Amy would look at her phone, and then get up quietly and go somewhere else in the apartment. Kitchen, bathroom, or outside on the balcony if the weather wasn’t terrible. She’d be back in fifteen, twenty minutes. She never said who it was.

I noticed this happening probably five or six times before I looked over one night when her phone lit up on the coffee table and I saw the name. Callum.

I didn’t say anything that night. I tried to figure out if I was bothered by it or just registering it as information. Amy and I are generally not a jealous couple. We have an agreement about phones that’s more relaxed than some people’s. I didn’t want to be the guy who makes a thing out of an old friend calling.

But it kept happening. And I kept watching her leave the room every time. And after about six weeks of that I’d realized that whether or not I was “supposed” to be bothered by it, I was.

On a Thursday in November Amy was in the shower and her phone lit up on the bathroom counter and I was standing in the doorway and it said Callum, 11:02pm. I picked it up. I answered it.

There was a pause. He’d been expecting Amy’s voice and I was not that. He said “oh.” Then he said “is this— sorry, is Amy around?” Normal enough. Then, before I could say anything, he said: “I’ve been counting down to this call all day. Sorry, I don’t know who this is, I just—” And he stopped.

I said I was Amy’s husband.

There was a longer pause after that.

He said hello and that he was sorry to call so late. Normal things. We talked for about three very strange minutes where he recovered and I asked some questions and he answered them in a way that was technically fine but the three sentences before he knew who I was had already happened.

I’ve been counting down to this call all day.

That’s what he said. He said it about a call to my wife.

When Amy came out of the shower I was sitting on the bed with her phone in my hand. She looked at it and then at me and she said “you answered it.”

I said yes. She sat down. We talked. Or we started to.

The conversation has been difficult because the actual question of what is happening between Amy and Callum is not a simple yes or no. She says it came back gradually, the contact. That they’d stayed friends in a low-key way and then it got more frequent in the last few months. She says she has feelings for him. She said that. She says she hasn’t acted on them and that this is different from what I’m thinking.

I asked what I was thinking. She said she didn’t know.

The problem is that “I have feelings for my ex” is not the same as “I’m having an affair.” I know that. I also know that 11pm every night for two months of calls she left the room to take is not nothing. I don’t know what to do with the space between those two things.

My friend Jake, who I’ve known since high school, said when I told him “mate that’s already crossed the line.” My sister, when I talked to her about it, said “you should figure out what YOU need from this before you decide anything.” Both of those are probably correct in different ways and they point in different directions.

Amy has offered to stop the contact completely. I said I didn’t know if cutting it off was what I wanted, because if this is something that’s going to come back I’d rather know about it. She cried. I didn’t say anything when she cried. I felt bad about that later.

We’re still in the apartment together. We’re having some conversations. Some days are more or less normal, which is its own strange thing, because we know how to be together and we haven’t stopped knowing how.

Callum hasn’t called since that night. I don’t know if that’s Amy’s doing or his or both.

I’m still not sure if this is something that can be worked through or if it’s already too broken. The countdown-to-the-call line plays in my head more than I’d like.