My husband left me while I was in the depths of postnat…

For Jen Waite, welcoming a baby girl was a dream come true – but it quickly turned into one of the most turbulent times of her life.

Her husband Marco* seemed oddly distant in the lead-up to the birth and things only got worse after they brought the newborn home.

‘He was constantly on his phone, even when I was in labour, and I felt so alone,’ Jen, now 41, told Daily Mail.

‘Looking back, I was really in survival mode, putting on a brave face thinking it was all normal.’

Three weeks after giving birth, Jen made a shocking discovery: an email chain on her husband’s laptop revealing an unspeakable betrayal that tore their marriage apart.

Jen first met Marco while they were both working at a restaurant in Queens, New York. At the time, she was a 25-year-old waitress and he was a 32-year-old bartender.

Jen was convinced he ‘wasn’t her type’ and didn’t find him attractive. But during the first day of hospitality training, the pair grew close.

Jen says Marco would ‘focus intensely’ on her, which made her feel special.

‘From then on, I was infatuated with him. The constant attention in the beginning was like laser-focus. There was a lot of unearned flattery. I felt like I was in love, but in hindsight it wasn’t,’ Jen recalled.

‘I was in the honeymoon phase but times a thousand.’

Jen admits she did have an uneasy gut feeling that something was off about Marco, but ignored it because the infatuation was so strong.

‘In the first few weeks we started dating, I was head over heels, almost as if it was life or death,’ she said.

‘After the first few months of this roller-coaster feeling, it blossomed into a pretty normal relationship – or so I thought. But that could’ve also been due to my age and not having as much life experience.’

The couple moved in together and, for a while, life was good.

‘I truly felt like I was with the love of my life – my best friend. Looking back, we never argued,’ Jen said.

The couple got engaged in December 2012 then married at City Hall the following February.

In June 2014, the couple stopped using contraception and Jen quickly fell pregnant.

The couple was thrilled, however, towards the end of her pregnancy, Jen began to notice that Marco was ‘checking out emotionally’.

‘He was working super long hours, or at least that’s what I believed he was doing. He kept saying how hard the restaurant industry was and he would get home at 4am – even my family felt sorry for him,’ Jen said.

When Jen went into labour, Marco was distracted by his phone and kept ‘disappearing’ to make phone calls in the hospital hallways.

‘He was constantly on his phone and didn’t seem like he wanted anything to do with the whole thing. He was just completely checked out, I felt so alone,’ Jen said.

Jen gave birth to a baby girl and was discharged from hospital a few days later.

Later that week, she went to visit her parents in Maine with her newborn daughter, while Marco stayed in New York for work.

During this time, Jen says she was hit by severe postpartum depression.

‘I don’t think I had ever been a super anxious person before,’ she said.

‘After I gave birth, it was like a flood of dread filled my body. It was like unfocused panic and I don’t think it had anything to do with him, I think it was hormonal. I felt that way for the first few months.’

Three weeks later, when she returned home, Jen picked up Marco’s laptop to find he’d left it logged into his email account.

Something made her pause. Maybe it was that postnatal sense of dread. Or maybe it was something more intuitive.

‘I could have just signed out and immediately gone into my email, but I did look through his,’ she said. ‘That’s when I saw an email with “Apartment” as the subject line.

‘Without even opening it, I could see the first sentence read: “Thanks for showing my girlfriend and I the apartment but we have decided to go with something else. Thank you for your time.”

‘At first, I was like, what? Why would he refer to me using the word “girlfriend”? When I read the whole email I was really confused, it was so weird.’

After investigating further, Jen found a woman’s name she didn’t recognise in the email chain. She searched Marco’s friends list on Facebook and found a young blonde woman of the same name.

Jen called Marco to confront him.

‘You’re cheating on me, how could you do that?’ she asked.

But Marco brushed her off.

‘There’s been a total misunderstanding,’ he told her. ‘You’re going to laugh when I tell you what happened.’

Marco claimed the woman was having difficulty getting an apartment, and so he was helping her out.

But by the time he got home from work that evening, he’d given up on his flimsy excuse.

‘(His story) changed from “I barely know her” to “we’re having an emotional affair” – because by then I’d found the phone statements of all of his phone calls. So then he really couldn’t say that he barely knew her,’ Jen said.

While Marco never admitted things had got physical, the betrayal cut deep.

Despite this, Jen wanted to work on the marriage for the sake of their daughter. But while staying with her family in Maine, she looked further into Marco’s phone records and discovered he’d been on the phone to his ‘girlfriend’ for 45 minutes while she was in labour.

It’d been going on for months. While she was pregnant, while she was giving birth, while she was in the depths of postnatal depression…

‘I was completely blindsided, it made me feel sick,’ she said.

After Jen left the marital home and went to live with her parents, Marco had changed his Facebook profile picture to an image of himself with the other woman within days.

She realised in that moment her marriage was over. Months later, she filed for divorce.

Jen wrote about her traumatic experience in her memoir A Beautiful, Terrible Thingsaying she found the process ‘very therapeutic’.

Now Jen is in a happy relationship with a younger man.

‘I only ever dated men older than me so then I lowered my settings on Hinge. I matched with a guy who turned out to be the most mature man I have ever met compared to men in their 30s and 40s,’ she said.

‘I had to rebuild my trust and belief system when it came to dating. I learnt how to detect red flags and don’t blame myself for what happened anymore.’

*Name has been changed