When Nikki's husband left, he swore he wasn't cheating. Then he emailed her at 4am.

When Nikki Parkinson accused her husband of cheating, he vehemently denied it.

"Absolutely not," he said. "You're crazy. Why would you think that? That's not true."

Introduced by a mutual hairdresser and interfering mother when Nikki was 25, the couple's story began as a "beautiful whirlwind romance". But during their 15 years of marriage, cracks started to show.

"I was quite growth driven and he was quite happy just to 'be,'" Nikki told Holly Wainwright on Mamamia's MID podcast.

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For about 18 months before their marriage ended, Nikki suspected a "disconnect".  But with her husband constantly denying her doubts, Nikki convinced herself she was "just going a bit crazy".

"I was asking myself, 'Am I just inventing these thoughts? Am I reading into things? Because I just don't feel really happy at the moment.'"

That was until her husband had a small medical procedure done, and Nikki's world was "knocked out" from beneath her feet.

"We got back from the hospital and he sat on the couch and he just said, 'I don't love you anymore. I'm leaving.' Cold hearted, brutal… nothing more than that."

Even though the then-lawyer had a gut feeling that something wasn't right, she was still "blindsided" by the moment.

"I'm sitting on the couch and I'm hearing these words come out of his mouth and they're landing, and I'm like, what the f**k has just happened here?," she shared.

At the time, her kids were 16 and 11 years of age. For the next few days, Nikki plastered on a happy face for their sake. In private, she called a girlfriend sobbing.

"I said: 'It finally happened,'" and she knew," Nikki remembered.

Bypassing the 'denial' and 'anger' stages of grief, Nikki skipped straight to bargaining, begging her husband to make it work.

Then came the email. 

It was 4am when Nikki picked up her phone and saw the subject line from her husband: I'M SORRY.

"I knew instinctively that something was obviously not right," Nikki recalled. "But the email was basically saying that he had actually been caught with the person he was having an affair with, and that's what he was sorry for."

He had been found out by the woman's husband, and the affair was now threatening to "blow up friendships and workplaces".

"It did exactly that. It blew everything apart, and then when the pieces start to land again, you then have to figure out how you're going to put that back together," said Nikki.

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After reading the email, the mother-of-two stormed into her backyard and dialled her husband's number, screaming obscenities at him down the phone.

When the anger died down, Nikki's thoughts went instantly to her kids and how to protect them from the fallout. The divorcing couple decided to tell the children together.

"It was one of the worst conversations that I've had to prepare for," Nikki said. "We were sitting down at the table and then I'm waiting for him to start the conversation and it just never starts, and the kids are kind of looking like, 'Gosh, who's died?'"

Deciding she had to step up, Nikki told her kids that their father was going to go and stay with "Nanny and Poppy" for a while.

They asked when he would be coming back. That's when Nikki realised she had to be more direct.

"Dad and I are separating," she said bluntly. "Dad's going to stay over there for a while and then we're going to figure out what it looks like. We're still a family. We're still going to try and come together. Dad's still Dad, I'm still me. You've got the best of both of us. Do you have questions?"

They did, but they would come later.

"They both just scattered in very different directions," Nikki recalled.

Outwardly, Nikki continued to check in on her kids. Inwardly, she was a wreck.

"I kind of just fell apart. I didn't feel like I could hold it all together," she said on MID. "I didn't realise that I was just putting one foot in front of the other and that's all I was doing."

The lawyer would be cooking dinner with tears streaming down her face. Telling her kids she was sweating, Nikki would jump in the shower to finish crying before returning to the pot of pasta as though nothing had happened.

But her kids were more intuitive than she realised, and a turning point eventually came when her youngest noticed Nikki had stopped eating.

"I didn't realise I was doing it until my youngest said to me, 'I'm not eating anymore until I see you put food in your mouth.'

"That was heart wrenching, for me to hear her say that. That moment, I'll never forget. I felt like I'd let her down because, what sort of a role model was I being? I'm asking them to be brave, I'm asking them to fall into this new way of life. Yet, here I am losing my shit over in the corner."

It was in that moment that Nikki's mindset changed. She decided to move forward, away from a house laced with memories.

"I moved the kids to the beach… I got in the ocean every day, rain, hail or shine, for 365 days, every morning and every afternoon, and that became my therapy."

Once the dust had settled, Nikki discovered a new purpose as a divorce coach, separation strategist and co-parenting expert.

"It's such a beautiful feeling for me to have somebody that can come to trust me like that," Nikki said.

"I have the practical side of things… but I also have the personal side where I can go, 'I know exactly where you're at, and I know that it feels like it is not going to get any better. But I'm here to tell you that, come back to me in a little while, and I will guarantee you that you're going to feel a whole different person in time.'"

Feature Image: Instagram/@thedivorcehub