Tina Knowles took one step to the right after telling Mathew Knowles to the left, to the left. 

In her new memoir Matriarch, out now, Beyoncé and Solange’s mom admitted that she briefly reconciled with her then-estranged husband—with whom she’d broken up over him fathering a child with another woman—after filing for divorce in 2009. 

“He’d changed after new counseling,” Tina wrote in her book, per US Weekly. “I didn’t believe him, but he was persistent, proved he’d gotten help, and as he courted me, I found myself falling in love again. The magnetic pull between us, this cosmic cord I had tried to cut so many times, was stronger than ever.”

Indeed, Tina wrote that she had only filed for divorce from her ex—whom she married in 1980—because she felt like she had “no choice” after finding out about his extramarital affair. 

As she put it, “In the aftermath of that explosion, I kept pace with my life, as I had now for years, sticking to my routine and allowing work to numb and carry me.”