Introduction

Every story has at least two sides.

For years, we each carried our own version of our marriage story. We remembered events differently, interpreted conversations differently, and viewed the same circumstances through very different lenses. At times, we were convinced the other person simply didn’t understand. Looking back, we can see that neither of us had the complete picture.

This book is not an attempt to decide who was right and who was wrong.

It is the story of two broken people who loved each other, hurt each other, misunderstood each other, and somehow stayed together long enough for God to do what neither of us could do for ourselves.

When we began writing, we quickly realised that telling our story through only one voice would never be enough. The events we experienced as husband and wife often felt completely different depending on whose eyes you were looking through. What devastated one of us sometimes barely registered with the other. What one person intended as protection, the other experienced as control. What one person viewed as survival, the other experienced as rejection, and in a wonderful way, further healing came from going through writing and reflecting on one another’s experiences.

Neither perspective tells the whole story but, together, they reveal something deeper.

Our journey includes betrayal, addiction, anger, shame, grief, fear, control, emotional wounds and years of unresolved pain. There were times when our marriage looked beyond repair. There were moments when both of us wanted to walk away. There were seasons when we lived more like strangers than husband and wife.

Yet beneath all the mess was a God who refused to give up.

Long before we recognised His hand at work, He was pursuing us individually and together; He was quietly transforming us from the inside out.

This is not a book about perfect people who found all the answers. It is a story about redemption. It is about learning that forgiveness is more than words, that healing often requires honesty, and that restoration is possible even when hope seems lost.

Perhaps you will recognise parts of yourself in our story. Maybe you are carrying hurts from your past. Maybe your relationship feels strained. Maybe you have wondered whether things can ever really change.

If so, we hope our story encourages you.

Because if there is one thing we have learned, it is this: God is far better at rebuilding broken things than we are at hiding the cracks.

Thank you for joining us on this journey.

This is our story.

1

The early days

Celene

‘Did you have no fear of God?’

The words pierced through the darkness of my bedroom, flung like arrows as the light came on and my mother’s voice rose in disbelief. That night, the fragile world I had built with Simon cracked open under the weight of exposed secrets. I had let my parents down. I had betrayed their trust. And worse – I had stepped outside the path I believed God wanted for me.

It’s strange how one moment, one confrontation, can unravel years of innocence and deeply held beliefs. But that night wasn’t the beginning. Nor was it the end. It was the rupture in a story that had long been unfolding – one rooted in love, longing and an early desire to please both God and those I loved.

You probably wouldn’t expect to meet your future husband in the playground, but Simon and I actually went to the same primary school, though he doesn’t remember me from then. His best friend was someone I dated a couple of times. Our paths crossed often, but it wasn’t until a wedding, when I was fifteen, that everything changed.

He sat beside me, bold and curious, and asked if I cared that he smoked weed. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t even fully understand what smoking weed meant. But not wanting to seem naïve, I shrugged. ‘It doesn’t bother me.’

A few months later, we went on our first date to Covent Garden. Ten days after that, he asked me to marry him. We were standing under an umbrella, me still in my school uniform and white socks, and I laughed, thinking it was a joke. But Simon was deadly serious. And despite having no real concept of love, time passed – and something real began to grow between us.

We married a few days after my twenty-first birthday, and that should’ve been the beginning of a perfect story. But the truth is, our imperfections began much earlier – long before vows were exchanged or rings were worn.

I grew up in a working-class Irish Catholic family in Hackney. The youngest of three, I came along eleven years after my second brother – unexpected, cherished and adored. My mum took pride in how I looked: curled ringlets, ribbons, bows, and seasonal shopping trips to Oxford Street to keep me dressed to impress. It made me stand out, sometimes for the wrong reasons. I was envied and bullied at times, often attracting attention without asking for it.

Church was a regular fixture in our lives. As a babe in arms, I’d been taken weekly, so faith, structure, tradition and attending Mass wasn’t something I questioned – it was simply what we did each Sunday. Emotions, however, were something we didn’t do. In our house, feelings were tucked away, brought out only in moments of death or crisis. When someone died, my mum would weep, my dad would bring her tissues and quietly support her. But otherwise, emotional expression was unfamiliar territory.

Simon, on the other hand, asked questions – lots of them. He wanted to know how I felt, what I thought, what I feared. It was disarming. No one had ever encouraged me to speak from the heart, and Simon’s probing often left me flustered. But it also made me feel seen – seen on a deeper level than I had ever experienced.

It was during one of those early conversations that he asked about my best friend, who’d died of cancer when I was thirteen. I hadn’t spoken much about that grief. I’d buried it, like I’d learned to do with all hard things. But Simon wanted to understand. And in trying to explain it to him, something inside me began to thaw. I realised how alone I’d felt during that difficult time. My parents had tried their best, my mum telling me she was praying and lighting candles for me, but none of that touched the emptiness I felt or actually helped me navigate an extremely sad time in my young life.

I was around ten years old when my mum shared how my friend’s dad had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, but I wasn’t to breathe a word to her. My uncle in Ireland had the same illness and it had left him speechless and immobile. That night, I found myself feeling very emotional about the situation. I didn’t want my friend to lose her dad the same way my uncle was no longer an active part of his family. It was the first time I found myself sobbing as I prayed, ‘Please, God, help him, heal him…’ His symptoms disappeared – likely a misdiagnosis, doctors claimed. But as a young girl, I often wondered: Did God hear my prayer that night?

I guess I had a high reverence for God. In my eyes, He was mighty, out of reach. I loved and feared Him and tried to walk the path I’d been shown. I knew the stories about Jesus; I loved singing hymns and didn’t even need to use the missalette^[1] to follow the order of Mass because I knew it by heart. But there was a phase when going to church on a Sunday got in the way of my teenage social life, so I lied to my parents and skipped going to Mass to hang out with some school friends at the local lido. But the deceit didn’t sit right, and within weeks I found myself choosing to go back to church – not just to please my parents (and yes, I did come clean about what I’d been doing), but because I genuinely felt something was missing from my life.

My relationship with Simon quickly became physical. I remember feeling anxious as I went to church, thinking this all-knowing God I feared would somehow punish me or get the priest to call me out for sinning. But other than my heart pounding in my chest nothing happened, and over time that godly fear lessened, so we took chances whenever we had the opportunity.

One night, my mother’s instincts caught up with us. That was the night she burst into my room waking me from sleep, shouting, accusing, heartbroken. ‘What does a sixteen-year-old know about love?’ She thought I’d been stupid, that I was too young and that all Simon wanted from me was sex. It was a night I’ll never forget.

Yet Simon didn’t run away. In fact, the fallout only made him more determined to marry me. He faced my parents and weathered the storm, which made me realise he meant every word when he said he loved me.

There had been a lot of talk and excitement about the new priest being transferred to our parish after a very long-standing Father of our community retired. He was well loved and quite jolly in his demeanour, but rumours were this newly appointed priest was young, had a heart for the youth and even had a dog called Pickles!

He arrived with open smiles and people warmed to him immediately. Church life quickly transformed as its members became more connected; there were day trips to Walsingham and other places of pilgrimage, groups travelled to Lourdes and I even travelled to Rome a couple of times on youth trips. Various clubs started, and the Friday night disco was the highlight of my week. Considering it was the late seventies, our church had a real social buzz about it.

As I left school at seventeen, the majority of my friendships shifted: some heading off to university, others finding boyfriends and exiting the scene, but my West End employment at a bank opened up a new group of friends. After-work meals, trips to the theatre and attending weddings and engagement parties were regular dates in the diary, and before we knew it, Simon and I were planning our own wedding and sending out invitations. I had just turned twenty-one.

The first year of marriage felt like a dream. We had a flat, two cats, a puppy and each other. We partied, decorated, worked hard and visited friends and family. Like many newlyweds, we adjusted to running a home, paying bills and getting to know one another’s quirks on a whole new level. We were happy. But reality soon crept in.

Simon didn’t like to plan. He changed jobs often, while I craved security and consistency. I’d worked for the bank for a few years when I developed tendonitis from repetitive typing and doctors advised a career change. I had no clue what to do.

One Monday, flicking through a magazine on the Tube, an advert caught my eye: ‘Want to try something different? Free modelling trial day.’

Something in me sparked. Maybe I could do this. This might be my chance. Simon was supportive, if a little bemused. He said, ‘Why not check it out?’

I did. I loved it. The posing, the catwalk, the buzz – it fed into things of my past: attention, admiration, a sense of possibility. But modelling is a strange, brutal world. Rejection is constant. And at five foot two, I didn’t fit the industry standard. Glamour modelling, however, didn’t care about height. And so a question quickly arose – would I pose topless? Would I take off my clothes?

Part of me hated the idea but I found many doors were closed for work because I was not tall enough. I wrestled with such a notion. Part of me longed to ‘be someone’. To be admired. Deep down, I hoped Simon would stop me. That he’d say, ‘No. I love you too much for that.’ But he didn’t. He simply said, ‘If you want to do it, I won’t stop you.’

I needed a man who would fight for me, tell me I was worth more. But I didn’t hear that. So I walked a path that brought a false sense of power – and deep shame.

I began to feel like I wasn’t enough; maybe Simon didn’t love me the way I’d hoped. That I was just… sexually useful.

I threw myself into modelling and promotional work. It paid the bills. But the industry had an undercurrent – flirting, sexual favours and manipulation. The more I saw, the more jaded I became. My view of men changed. I started to see lust and control everywhere. My mum’s words echoed in my ears: ‘Men are only interested in you for one thing.’

And my illusions of Simon – the protector, the knight – were crumbling. I began to resent him. His use of cannabis only deepened the wedge. I hated it – even the smell. He said he could ‘take it or leave it’, but I feared what I didn’t understand, so every time he smoked, it told me that he didn’t really care or love me. His actions created a gap I didn’t know how to bridge. It chipped away at my trust.

And then came the moment I didn’t expect – the affair.

It was short-lived. A few meetings before the guilt set in. Heavy, unrelenting guilt. I ended it. But it stayed with me. I needed to tell Simon. I couldn’t keep living with a lie. As crazy as it might seem, I wanted our marriage to work, and deep down I wanted honesty and connection.

We were away from home, in Scotland, just the two of us. I braced myself for rage, but instead, Simon was quiet. He listened. He asked questions. And I cried. He said he forgave me – but didn’t want anyone to know. We needed to keep this to ourselves, so we agreed to carry on. We tried to put the pieces back together.

But we didn’t truly heal.

We didn’t talk about what we’d lost. Or what we feared. We avoided the roots and simply trimmed the branches. I blamed his drug use. He blamed my actions. But underneath it all was a broken trust, unmet expectations and silent grief.

Simon

When Celene told me about her affair, it broke me.

I honestly didn’t know what to say, think or do. I quickly acknowledged I was as much to blame as she was. I’d seen the cracks but had done nothing to fix them. I responded the same way I did when I was bullied as a child: I didn’t share it with anybody and hid the pain and hurt, pretending everything was fine to the world around me. I thought I was good at shutting my feelings and emotions down, keeping them contained and not letting them out. I wouldn’t have known what to do with them if they had been unleashed. It was safer this way.

But inwardly, I wrestled each day – swinging like a pendulum from fully blaming Celene to berating myself for sticking my head in the sand and ignoring the signs. I knew things had to change, but I didn’t know what – or how.

I suppose the beginning of my story is where those emotional habits were formed. I’m a child of the sixties from a big family with five siblings. We lived on a council estate in East London. My parents were both from Bethnal Green.

They worked hard. Mum took in piecework, anything from making clothes to painting toy soldiers, and Dad had worked for a national telecommunications company for years, doing all the overtime he could get. I remember helping Mum pick loose threads from finished garments and tagging along to their evening cleaning jobs. They set a foundation for my own work ethic – do what it takes, stay quiet, keep going and work hard.

It wasn’t the easiest childhood, but I knew I was loved. If I were a kid today, I’d probably get special assistance. I was nervous, a bed-wetter, with undiagnosed dyslexia that plagued me through school. My mum suspected something wasn’t right and it took a lot of effort to be seen by a child psychologist.

Even with a diagnosis, there was no support. I entered secondary school knowing I had a problem, but not what to do about it. Schools didn’t know either. Their solution for dyslexia was to place me in the remedial class, lumped in with others who struggled academically. I could hold my own in all subjects, but reading was almost impossible, which made it all the more frustrating.

Religion wasn’t part of our family life. We attended church for weddings and the occasional funeral. My only understanding of God came from overhearing my mum’s vague beliefs: I asked her what ‘C of E’ meant when I heard her say it at the hospital while filling in a form. She didn’t explain much, just ‘Church of England’ and that God was ‘out there somewhere’.

Later my parents got into spiritualism. One evening, they had some family over and held a session in the kitchen. Us kids watched TV in the front room, but I got bored and wandered in. They were using a Ouija board. I sat silently, observing. The room felt different – like the air had thickened. It intrigued me. Another time, while our parents were out, my brother and I found the board and tried it. I remember a discomfort I couldn’t explain – like something in me knew it wasn’t right. I never went near it again.

When I hit my teens, Mum thought it’d be good for me to help an older family member, Dave, on weekends. He rallied cars and I’d loved motors from an early age. To me, this was heaven. Dave was mostly self-taught. He ran his own business and knew a lot about mechanics. I spent my spare time at his place, in his garage, learning about engines, tools and life. I became part of his crew for Rallycross events. It boosted my confidence.

Hackney in the seventies and eighties wasn’t an easy place to grow up. Crime and drugs were common, and while I didn’t fall deeply into either, I didn’t completely avoid them. I dabbled with cannabis in my teens – socially, not habitually – and somehow never touched harder drugs. Alcohol was more my vice, though I’ve always questioned society’s acceptance of it over other drugs.

I started dating Celene when I was sixteen. We’d known each other through family connections and school, but it wasn’t until I saw her in a dance show that I really noticed her. Getting her to go out with me was a challenge, but I did it – and ten days from our first date, I proposed. That’s me – I don’t make many decisions, but when I do, I’m all in.

We were inseparable. Long phone calls about nothing and everything. She became my best friend. Initially shy in conversation, she opened up more and more and I soaked in every detail of her world.

Back then, most of my friends couldn’t wait to leave school, but I wasn’t ready to leave so I stayed on. I wanted to do something more – graphic art was my dream. I was the first in my family to pursue higher education, taking four O levels and A level art.

Sixth form brought new confidence, new friends, even a lifelong one. But dyslexia still haunted my academic path due to my poor written English. My art teacher almost blocked me from sitting the exam, citing a weak portfolio because I hadn’t taken the class seriously. They were right: I’d been distracted by the opposite sex! My parents offered to pay for me to take the exam independently, which shamed the teacher into allowing me to sit the exam officially.

I pulled together a portfolio in six weeks and when the exam day came, Mum told me to call on the spirit world for help from my dead nan. I’d often talk to her in my head, but I’d never heard anything back, yet somehow it comforted me.

When I entered the art room, the task was to paint a still life. I was gutted – paint wasn’t my thing. I preferred chalk, pencil or pastels. But when the results came through, I was stunned. I’d done well, one mark off the highest grade. I studied closely the piece I had painted and couldn’t believe I’d done it. It felt too good. I was convinced I had help that day – though I wasn’t sure from whom.

Yet I couldn’t get into art school – my academic results weren’t good enough. I did a diploma instead, hoping it would lead back to graphic art, but it didn’t. Dyslexia still blocked my educational path.

I took on three jobs to keep my rust-bucket of a car on the road while at college. After I finished, I got a job in a printing business through a connection of a friend of a friend.

Three weeks in, I hated it. The guy training me made it clear he didn’t want me there, so I told the boss I wasn’t coming back. He insisted I work a month’s notice but I wasn’t having that, so I warned him things might not go smoothly if I stayed unwillingly. He quickly let me go!

I landed a job with my cousin Dave, installing fire alarm and radio systems. It was mobile, well paid and I enjoyed working with someone I trusted – until I didn’t. One Friday, Dave called a meeting and told everyone we were out of work. No notice, no last pay. I couldn’t believe it.

I waited until the others left and confronted him. ‘What about me?’ I asked. ‘We’re family.’

‘If you want money, come back self-employed.’ He wouldn’t give me a van, or tools – nothing. I was stunned, angry and hurt.

I took legal advice, but dropped the case when my aunt asked me to. I didn’t want to upset her. Instead, I confronted Dave one last time and let him know I wasn’t doing it for him. I was twenty and already tasting the bitterness of betrayal.

For a while, I filled my time labouring for a friend before another door opened – this time with a growing alarm company.

That change marked a new start. Celene and I bought a flat in Hackney, got married and, like most young couples, had high hopes and dreams for our future.

I worked extra jobs with a colleague to earn more. We’d often head to the pub after finishing. I was always cautious with alcohol and driving, remembering a time in my youth when I’d overdone it and nearly caused an accident.

Celene and I created our little home, decorated it together, landscaped our tiny garden and looked after our pets – it was beautiful.

Then came a turning point. Celene was stunning – but now she wanted to share that beauty with the world and she asked for my blessing. I didn’t like it, but I didn’t stop her; maybe I should have. I thought maybe this career in modelling was something she needed. I said nothing.

We started leading separate lives – me with work and social drinking, her with modelling and travel. We drifted, but I didn’t see the distance until she told me about the affair.

It destroyed me inside. I didn’t explode. I just folded inward – repeating the pattern I’d learned as a child: quiet, hidden pain. I became trapped in a quiet war between guilt, grief and shame, unsure how to move forward.

Something had to change. But I didn’t know what – or how.

^[1] Small book, used during Mass so the congregants can all follow it.