He told her about the affairs when I had my first miscarriage.
When I lost our stillborn baby and couldn’t breathe through the grief.
When we were drowning in debt and I was working double shifts trying to save our family.
In every one of those darkest moments, he had done the same thing.
He found another woman.
Some of them, she wrote, were people from our own social circle.
Women she personally knew.
Women who had smiled at me at dinners and gatherings.
That was when she began writing everything down.
Every date.
Every name.
Every betrayal.
She said she waited years for the right moment to tell me.
But when I was hospitalized, fighting for my life, she couldn’t bring herself to destroy me with the truth.
So she made another choice.
“She was too fragile,” she wrote. “If she knew the full truth then, it would have broken her.”
Instead, she became the villain.
She pretended to arrange the affair.
She told me she had replaced me.
She made herself the monster so that I would leave without hesitation.
Without clinging to a man who didn’t deserve me.
Without wasting more years hoping he would change.
But that wasn’t the part that made my hands go numb.
At the bottom of the page was one final note.
“I paid for the treatments.”
I stared at the sentence.
Again.
And again.
The expensive procedures.
The ones the doctors said gave me a real chance.
The ones I had never understood how I could suddenly afford.
She had paid for them.
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