TIFU trying to surprise my wife and leading her on to believe i was cheating

me 22m , wife 22f no kids. also technically not "today" ifu

She and i recently moved to a new country where she had to work. we decide she would work and i would take care of the house since she got paid pretty well. It was going well for a few months. I saw an advertisement for jingle writing.( jingles are small catchy tunes for advertisements) So i thought why not apply since this was something i've wanted to do for a long time and hadnt had the chance to do in my original country. i applied and i was to submit the jingle in a few days.

Luckily i did get it. I then had to go to play the jingle for them and had to stay as the jingle was being filmed. So they decided to give me a time 3hrs per day and i said decided to keep it from 1-4 as my wife was out from 10am to 530 in the evening. So everything goes the same for a month. I had got the paycheck(a nice amount) around the 18th day but decided to not cash it in until they finished filming the commercial.

All throughout this i hadnt told my wife about this bc i wanted her to be surprised at what happened. So the commercial filming ends and i decide to tell her about it today. i return home happily thinking i would surprise my wife and i open the door and there she is in tears.

She tells me she knows that ive been cheating on her and starts to cry more. and i tell her that ive not been cheating. She asks me about how ive been out in the afternoons. I then ask her to sit down and then i explain everything thats been happening and about how i wanted to surprise her (and show her the check just as a proof of what ive been doing). She then hugs me and kisses me and says that somedays ago she had come home a bit early (at the time i was out working). When i returned she asked me where i was and i had said that i had just gone for a drive. She then came home again at the same time somedays later to again find me missing. Thats when she started to get suspicious so she just went back to work that day and didnt say anything as to not accuse me for something possibly coincidental. She did the same thing for a couple of days again but still didnt see me at home. She then discussed it with some friends of hers and they all told her that me cheating was a very plausible case. Some of them even told her to cheat on me but she didnt do it as she wanted to talk with me before anything else happened and thankfully i hadnt done anything bad. She then cries a bit more (out of happiness this time). We then had sex and then later on i took her out for a nice romantic dinner.

Im not a redditor but she said it would make a good story here

TL;DR: Decided to be a Stay at home guy, found an opportunity for a job that i loved, got the job(less work hours),didnt tell wife to surprise her later, wife comes home some times when i was working only to see i wasnt there, tearfully asks me if i was cheating and i end up telling her what ive been doing