Think I am massively overdue for an update. Apologies as it will be very long.
I got my ducks in a row, kicked him out of the house, saw a lawyer and desperately started searching for a job. I had counselling, went back to work and got a life for myself. I was pretty much a wreck when I wasn’t busy but I kept trucking. All this time I had to listen to my h and his tale of self pity, and I even ended up handing him two of our best friends on a plate because he was circling the drain and I couldn’t be the one to console him when it was my life he had ruined too. Plus there was then the fun day where he declared all his reading had allowed him to recognise that he had had an emotional affair with said best friend a year prior to starting the physical affair with OW, and in fact he had only introduced me to friend in the first place because they had recognised they were getting inappropriately close and thought they should bring her husband and his wife in on it and make it a more wholesome group family thing!!!! That news obviously made my life so much better 
From D-day itself he had been begging me to go to marriage counselling/ go on a date, and he had broken up with OW that day and read all the books, but at the end of the day I couldn’t even bear to be in the same room as him. By Christmas I was getting on with my life and tried to move on and even went on OLD and tried dating -with limited success since I am so damaged. I filed for divorce on the six month deadline because it was important to me to do it on grounds for adultery and I had been feeling like I had lost all momentum and should have done it on day one (when he begged me to wait six months and see).
In late February (7-8 months on) our joint best friend, best man at our wedding, godfather to our DC returned from travelling around the world and came to visit us. Obviously our having separated made this difficult and when my h got allocated the Saturday night and I was relegated to 9am on Sunday morning I was a bit miffed (knowing they would be up drinking and I would get a hungover reunion) so decided to suck it up and say I would come to dinner with them for old times sake. Which I did, and we actually had a good time although too much was drunk by all. After that my hatred of h softened and I started spending time with him, either going to the pub for Sunday lunch with the kids, or cinema for kids club, and even on our own as a date a couple of times. I also agreed to go to marriage counselling finally in april, after c. 9 months of him pushing for it and me saying I wasn’t ready (which I wasn’t) . The counselling didn’t actually happen until June by the time I had looked into it and gone through the work employee assistance programme. And the first one was terrible because he looked a state (with man flu and as it later turned out a hangover) and she sympathised with him, asking if he was “run down” and saying I needed to forgive and forget and never mention it again. And when she asked him if he wanted to reconcile he said he didn’t know, which threw me as the whole basis for going was that he had been begging me to for nearly a year! Anyway I asked the EAP for a new counsellor as I decided you couldn’t unmake a first impression. Second counsellor was better- partly because she seemed to see through his bullshit, but on the basis that he said he had ended it a year ago and ceased contact, was committed to reconciling and did want to work towards getting past it, we agreed to continue the sessions.
The next weds we went out for dinner, just the two of us, and then went back to his flat nearby for a nightcap. We were listening to songs on YouTube and I had his iPad in my hands when the OW face flashed up, FACE TIMING him at 11pm at night. And then my world unravelled for the second time. He denied everything, tries to say he doesn’t know why she is ringing, then that they are working together again but he hadn’t told me. Obviously I don’tbelieve for a second that she was VIDEO calling him at 1130 at night about work!! I send him for his phone, which takes an inexplicable time to retrieve and by the time I get it it is conspicuously wiped. I ask where her messages are and he says he has been cleaning out, prior to this occasion, nothing suspicious at all, no sirree. Of course he hasn’t learned a thing a year on and I catch him out by pointing the surprising number of WhatsApp calls from someone he isn’t in contact with outside work but who never messages him.
He continues to beg and plead his innocence for ten more days. He says he is all in and wants to prove himself and gives me all his passwords and even helps me to send up an online spying account thing that I successfully used to retrieve his deleted data with, with his permission, last year. But strangely it doesn’t manage to retrieve anything at all, which I put down to him changing his apple Id assword at least once a day until the end of the free trial, while also asking me if I have received any backups yet?! Plus some gaslighting about how can he prove the absence of something.... it just isn’t possible. During this time he is making such a fuss about it that I have a niggling doubt that maybe this was all some inexplicable coincidence, and I am running around trying to prove his innocence too. Finally he comes to pick the kids up and I ask to look at his phone and rather than reading his messages I look at the settings and find that despite his claims he has set his phone to never back up anything. So there is nothing to retrieve. And moreover, he has uninstalled and reinstalled what’s app and others on the night of the ill timed video call, so there is doubly no chance of retrieving anything. After I tell him he is a pathological liar I get him being selfpitying again, saying he doesn’t know why he did it tralala. Eventually after that he admits that he was “friends” with OW despite supposedly being NC, then gradually he admits that he dropped her at her house in a taxi once, then that they kissed once, and finally, after about ten days he says yes he had been sleeping with her again but still claims it was all over before that night and only three times And that it had been an ill advised friendship with OW along with a couple of stupid mistakes. On the anniversary of D-day he goes to work to meet OW for lunch and explain that they cannot be friends, that they never can be or should have been, as he wants to reconcile with his wife even though the chances of this happening are getting very low. That evening we go to marriage counselling and I am furious and spend the entire time ranting, not only because it is the anniversary of ddday and because he has told me OW was “hurt” by the conversation, but because when we arrive at counselling we can’t get in because his scorched earth mission has gone so far as deleting, uninstalling and reinstalling the standard text messaging app that held details of the gate code to get in!!