Sometimes the truth doesn’t arrive gently. Sometimes it hits all at once — and keeps hitting.
Several years ago, TikToker @shaunygirl shared that after her husband died, she discovered he had been having affairs with four different women. Two were her friends, and one was her best friend.
She said she met her first husband in 2006 when she was 20, after they crossed paths at a nightclub. They fell for each other quickly, and within a year she was pregnant. Their first son was born in 2008, and their daughter arrived two years later.
By her account, he was personable and a good father — but there were moments that didn’t quite add up. Some weekends, she said, he would disappear.
He later started a car-dealing business with friends, determined to build something on his own. He was out every day, and she said he usually explained where he’d been. She assumed he was grinding to get the business off the ground and didn’t feel she had a reason to suspect anything else.
In 2012, he proposed. She said yes, and they married in 2014.
A year later, she said, something happened that stuck with her. She was using his phone to check the weather when a message popped up. According to her, he turned pale, snatched the phone, rushed downstairs, and shut the living room door.
She banged on the door demanding answers. Looking back, she believes he was likely deleting evidence of cheating. When he finally came out, she said he insisted he was arranging a surprise. Eventually, she said, they moved past it.
In 2016, she noticed him seeming low and withdrawn. When she asked what was wrong, he blamed stress — business wasn’t doing as well as he expected.
Then, just days before their daughter’s birthday, they got into a major argument about him going out drinking. On the day of their daughter’s birthday, she said he left and didn’t come back for the celebrations.
That night, one of his friends messaged her asking if she’d heard from him. She checked his phone activity and saw he’d been active since 10 a.m. Something felt off, she said — like alarm bells were suddenly ringing.
She put the children in the car and drove to the garage where he sold cars. When they arrived, she left the kids in the car and looked around the unit. Believing the door was locked, she called the police and reported him missing. She said police told her to return home and wait for an officer to take a statement.
At around 2 a.m., she received a call from a private number. A woman asked for her husband’s best friend’s phone number but wouldn’t give her name or explain why she needed it.
During the call, the woman admitted she had been seeing her husband for two years and knew about his wife and children. She told @shaunygirl the relationship began two months before the wedding. @shaunygirl said she was devastated and called her mother and a friend to come over.
“Thankfully, they did because about half an hour after they both walked through the door, I got the phone call from his friend, his best friend, who said that unfortunately, he had been found dead in his car-dealing unit,” said @shaunygirl.
“I think I screamed and made a sound that I didn’t think the human body was probably capable of making. My whole world had fallen apart in the space of an hour.”
She said her husband’s best friend and other friends knew about the other woman — and that the woman lived across town and seemed to know a lot about her life.
“When I eventually looked at her Instagram, it was exactly the same as mine,” she said. “It mirrored mine in exactly the same way. She would do things that I would do, such as bake cakes, make pallets. She based her entire personality on me, and I had no idea.”
In the aftermath of his death, she said friends gathered around her and tried to support her through the shock and grief — especially her best friend. That made what came next even harder.
Three months after the funeral, she received her husband’s phone back from police. She began going through messages and discovered, she said, that her husband and her best friend had been sleeping together for months.
She said she also found messages showing he had been meeting another woman — a mother of her son’s friend — someone who had done her hair for the wedding and whom she considered a friend or at least an acquaintance.
“The next message that I found was where he’d been meeting up with a girl who was my son’s friend’s mom,” she said. “She had done my hair for my wedding. She was also a friend and acquaintance, somebody who would be friendly with me, and she was also meeting up with him. Another girl was his business partner’s daughter, whom we had just been on a big holiday with as a big group.”
After those discoveries, she said she messaged her best friend and told her never to speak to her again. She added that she never truly got closure from any of the women involved.
Instead, she focused on raising her children. She later met someone new and had another child.
Now, nine years after her husband’s death, she says she is still trying to process everything that happened.
