Cheryl could hardly believe her ears in 2010 when her husband, Ashley Cole, was accused of cheating for a second time.
The Girls Aloud star - who married Ashley 16 years ago today - was away in the US when news first broke and immediately flew home to confront him at their £4million mansion in leafy Surrey, only to find he had already fled.
Despite initially thinking the accusers were lying, as Cheryl pored over the reports, she came to the conclusion that the details they gave were ones, "nobody could have known, and nobody should have known except me."
"One girl said they drank rosé wine in a hotel bedroom together, and that Ashley smoked. He does like rosé wine, and at first I told myself she could have seen him drinking it in the bar rather than sharing a bottle with him in the bedroom," Cheryl wrote in her 2012 autobiography, My Story by Cheryl Cole.
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"The smoking, though? He’s a footballer and this wasn’t something he did in public. Hardly anybody knew he smoked."
Details about the alleged intimacy stung the most, with Cheryl revealing claims about 'hand holding in bed' tore her heart out.
"That hit a nerve, a big one," she continued. "That was my husband that someone else was talking about. The description 'like relationship sex' was so painful to read I blocked it out totally; I couldn’t deal with it.
"I pushed the papers away, feeling sick at the smell of the newsprint, and then I actually vomited."
Bereft, she spent days fluctuating between ignoring his phone calls and begging him to tell the truth and put her out of the 'torture'.
"When I put the phone down I sobbed hysterically, like a little child does, crying so hard I was gasping for air and wanting to be sick," she wrote.
When Ashley came around to collect some things, she was the one who comforted him, claiming he "clung to me like a little boy."
But despite spending two months crying - sometimes hysterically, sometime silently into her pillow all night - she was certain that divorce was the only option. After all, Ashley had already been accused of cheating two years earlier.
"I just wanted to get out of the marriage and out of the house," she said.
And a source told The Mirror at the time that absolutely nothing Ashley could say would change her mind.
“Cheryl’s nobody’s fool. She didn't believe a word.
“Cheryl repeatedly asked him to tell her the truth. She asked him if there were any more girls.
“He begged her to believe him but then, as she suspected, more girls came forward. Her parting words to him were ‘You have lied, lied and lied. You disgust me. I’ll see you around.'"
Heartbreakingly, as her moving date grew closer, her devastation grew. Whilst filming The X Factor live shows she admitted she was 'cracking up'.
"Every room held a memory, and I didn’t realise it, but I think I was actually going through a nervous breakdown," she said.
Thankfully, life got better for Cheryl, and she went on to marry restauranteur Jean Bernard Fernandez-Versini in 2014. That union only lasted two years, and Cheryl then moved on with singer Liam Payne. And while they might no longer be together, they are united in love for their adorable son Bear, five.
So does Cheryl ever regret the way things turned out? Or think that they went wrong? Not one bit.
“No, I wouldn’t say wrong; I’d probably say right,” told the Irish examiner in 2012. “Me mam’s like: ‘You’ve done it the right way round. I didn’t even know myself when I had children. You’re at that nice age where you’re developing into a young woman and you can give your children the things they need.'"
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