A year later...

It's been over 15 months since the discovery of my husbands PA. It has been almost a year since our DDay. Last September my husband hit such rock bottom that he wanted to kill himself. Over the course of a few weeks I discovered the extent of his betrayal, the money he had spent, the escorts he used for his fetish. I never really considered pornography a problem. I never considered it cheating. Not until he completely replaced me with his fetish. He trained his brain to respond sexually to female bodybuilders and nothing else. I spent years unhappy in our marriage, knowing something was wrong but not knowing what that something was. I've torn myself apart trying to figure out how he managed to hide so much from me. How naive and stupid I must have been to not see what was going on in front of me. Even at our worst, I trusted my husband. The porn or fetish wasn't a surprise, I'd made some discoveries over the years. I was under the misguided impression that I would rather he watch porn than cheat on me. I'm ex military, My husband is serving and we have spent an awful lot of our time apart. I never had any idea that the onset of depression and almost complete change of personality was down to PA. I never knew that porn could cause PIED (in my husbands case DE). The more I read on the subject, the more my husbands behaviour and changes made sense.
My husband says he has been clean since DDay. I use 'says' because whilst our relationship has changed so much in the last year, I'm not ready to say I trust him 100 percent. His personality, his sex drive and performance and all the other changes he has made since giving up his addiction point towards him being clean. But a small part of me is terrified to give my trust to him. He shattered it in such spectacular fashion that I'm not sure I will ever be ready place my trust in him completely.
Recently his sobriety came into question. I found a thumb drive that contained files dated 2 months before. A thumb drive I have opened and checked before. It brought all the hurt, anger, panic, devastation and betrayal right to the front of my mind. In the few hours before I could confront my husband about this drive, it wasn't the relapse that hurt the most. I've expected a relapse since DDay. What caused me the most distress was that every night we have laid in bed and done FANOS. Every night he has told me he is sober. And I thought that every night he lied to me. When he got home and I confronted him he pleaded ignorance. He swore on our son's life that he was sober and had been sober since DDay. He promised me he hadn't touched this thumbdrive. I took a logical approach and tried to piece this together. I realised that the date and time of creation of these files I knew what my husband was doing (stacking a wood delivery in the garage for hours). If he had relapsed and was trying to hide it would he be stupid enough to leave it where I could find it? There were other factors that made it highly unlikely that he had relapsed. I entertained the idea that during one of my snooping sessions I inadvertently unhid files. We talked again and I explained to him that A relapse wouldn't end our relationship but lying about one would. I gave him another chance to come clean telling him we would deal with it, but I also explained that if he was lying he was messing with my mental health again, asking me to believe a reality that wasn't true. Gaslighting. I explained that I'd worked hard to overcome his betrayal and the trauma it has caused me, and a relapse would hurt, but lying about it and ultimately finding out the lie would be the end of us. He maintained his innocence. I threw the hard drive in the fire. It didn't do me any good obsessing about things I have no control over (in fact it made me ill). I can't make him tell me the truth, and as most of our marriage has involved so much deceit, I don't trust myself yet to know if he is lying.
BUT....But the fact is he has worked hard to become a better person. We are closer than we have ever been. We are enjoying a healthy sex life where ED is never a problem. We have open lines of communication. He displays none of the anger he had when PMOing. He is a better father. We have a stronger relationship.
I always said I'd give our relationship and my husband a year before making the decision to leave or divorce. I think this stopped me taking the easy way out, but I've realised I can't put a timeline on healing. Yes it still tears my heart open to think of the things my husband did, and I'm not sure I can ever think about these things without some feeling of hurt. But we are making new memories that don't hurt to remember. I love my husband and we are still trying to repair our fractured lives. Time is definitely what it takes to do this. We've been together 13 years but its only in the last year that I've truly gotten to know my husband.