I was going through my wife’s phone when she woke up. I didn’t try to hide what I was doing. I was done playing nice. “What are you doing?
” she asked. “What does it look like I’m doing? ”
She told me to hand over the phone. I told her I would once she explained what I was looking at.
She said I knew what I was looking at, and she didn’t have to explain it. She didn’t deny it. Not once. She just let the silence hang there and told me I already knew the truth.
It’s been eight years since Arena and I got married. We were in love when we were dating, and maybe for the first two years of our marriage. But things started going downhill, and they never really recovered. I kept trying to fix things at first.
Sometimes it worked for a bit. Sometimes it didn’t work at all. Eventually, I got tired and stopped bothering. We don’t have kids.
I don’t know why I stayed. Maybe I was nostalgic for the good times. Maybe I still hoped the love we had could be rekindled. I’m a hopeless romantic sometimes.
But that part of me is dead now. Her cheating didn’t sting as much as it would have in the first two years. That’s ironic. You’d expect it to hurt worse the closer you get to a decade together.
But I guess love plays a big part in how much betrayal hurts. I don’t think she was trying to hide things from me. I think she just got sloppy. She gave it away when we had friends over one day.
She left the room to take a phone call. When she came back, she seemed completely normal. That’s what made it strange. She had taken other calls that day and hadn’t left the room once.
When our friends left, I asked who called. She said, “Someone. ”
That put me on guard. I tried to ask more, but she claimed it was just a relative.
I asked if there was bad news. She said there wasn’t, and she didn’t expand on it. I became more observant after that. I noticed she started coming home about an hour late on a number of nights.
Her excuses didn’t make sense. Traffic. Extra work. Things that didn’t add up when I really thought about them.
My assumption was that she was cheating. Looking back, that wasn’t a bad assumption at all. She naps a lot and isn’t guarded with her phone, so I had plenty of opportunities to check it. I picked the slot that seemed safest.
I didn’t want to get caught. Our fights had become messy. When I went through her phone, I found the confirmation quickly. The last person she had spoken to was someone named Victor.
From their conversations, I could tell he was the guy she had replaced me with. He was receiving all of her love. She sounded the way she used to sound when we were still in love. It wasn’t just a crush.
They were in love with each other. Things had gotten intimate between them. I kept going through the messages, screenshotting the worst parts. They had been together for at least eight months.
Victor wasn’t the reason our marriage deteriorated. But I started to wonder if there had been other Victors in the past. I tried to go further back in her messages, but she woke up before I could confirm anything else. I asked her to explain it.
She said there was nothing to explain. I snapped. I talked about how much we had loved each other at the start. I wanted to know where we had gone wrong.
I asked if there had been someone else before Victor. Someone who had derailed our marriage early on. She didn’t say anything. She didn’t deny it.
That made me feel like there had been someone else. She was never going to admit it, but if it hadn’t happened, I’d expect her to deny it. I asked her whether she was in love with Victor and if she wanted to be with him instead. She gave me a look.
It was almost apologetic. Like she felt a twinge of guilt. That was strange, because it had been ages since I felt like she cared about me at all. But it was too little, too late.
I crashed out after that look. I kept asking why she was doing this to us. I had been a good husband. That’s a fact.
I didn’t do anything to deserve being treated that way. She snapped at me. She told me our marriage was dead. We both knew it was dead.
She didn’t understand why I wanted to hold on to something that had no life left in it. She said I just had to deal with it and move on. I was speechless. Her tone was so harsh and unremorseful.
I asked why she couldn’t have just filed for divorce if she was so done with me. “Our marriage had its advantages,” she said. That was her answer. I was used because there were perks to being with me.
I couldn’t say anything else to her. Nothing I said was going to leave a mark on a woman like that. I had sacrificed so much for her. I had done so much to make it possible for her to stand on her own two feet with a business of her own.
Even when our marriage wasn’t happy, I was still doing so much for her. None of that mattered. I should have ended things when they were due to be ended. But I was still hoping we could rekindle something.
Stupid of me. When I wrote that first post, I genuinely didn’t think I’d have any reason to update. I thought I’d meet with a lawyer, have her served with papers, split our assets, and that would be the end of it. That was wishful thinking.
I chose to make things more complicated than that. And I’d do it again, because it worked out quite nicely for me and turned out horrible for her. My ex-wife had a business she was running. She was able to get it going pretty well largely because of commitments and sacrifices I made.
I’m not going to say I’m the sole reason for her success. She’s a good business person. I can admit that much. But she would never be in the position she’s in now if it wasn’t for me.
The way we split assets after the divorce wasn’t crazy. Courts in our country are lenient with marital assets. Even though I had quite a bit more than her, it was deemed that she had enough to take care of her needs and maintain her lifestyle. So she didn’t get any of mine.
No alimony. We kept what was ours. We sold shared things like the house and split the proceeds. I’m glad we came to an agreement.
It showed me how much she wanted out of the marriage. That made me upset. It was how I wanted the divorce to go, but it still made me upset. I realized I had to do something to get at her.
So I chose to hit her at her business. There was no way to take her down for good, but I had the perfect opportunity at my disposal. Before the divorce, she had been negotiating a deal with a chain of hotels. Her business does domestic, commercial, and industrial cleaning.
She started from domestic cleaning and built up substantially. A lot of that leveling up came from interest-free loans from my own pocket. The company would pay them back, but all that extra equipment wouldn’t have been easily acquired without me. I was going to hijack her deal.
It was going to be the biggest deal she had ever had. Potentially worth a few hundred thousand dollars when converted, because it was meant to last years. I knew all the details because I handled her work correspondence. I’m good at writing, and I’ve been in business much longer than she has.
She trusted me with that. So I knew the emails and contacts. I knew how many years the contract was meant to be for and how much was on offer. I knew what services she was going to provide and which ones came at extra cost.
I knew everything I needed to put together a better deal. So I walked right over to one of her biggest competitors and made a deal. I told them I had a good chance to score them a sweet contract, but I needed a written agreement that I would take a non-negotiable chunk of the payout. They were doubtful, but it wasn’t going to cost them anything unless they landed the contract.
I worked over the details with them. The contract we put together was only seven and a half percent cheaper than what Arena’s company was asking for, but they were offering a lot more in terms of service. It was going to be very profitable for this company even with my cut taken out. I sent an email on their behalf, and we waited.
They got an appointment, and then we waited again. They contacted me several times during negotiations, and I told them the directions to go in because Arena had gone far in the process and I knew what they liked to hear. It took weeks to hear back. When we did, we were popping a bottle of champagne in the cleaning company’s office.
To say I was happy would be an understatement. If Arena and I had divorced just because we grew tired of each other, I wouldn’t have sabotaged her. But she cheated on me multiple times and had zero remorse. I get that we were bored of the marriage, but that never pushed me to cheat.
I still had hope we’d make things work. She didn’t have that hope. She just moved on and slept with other people even with a ring on her finger. If I meant that little to her, she didn’t deserve to enjoy the things that came out of our marriage.
I got a very tasty check for my participation. The company said they’d love it if I reached out with similar opportunities. I don’t think I’ll ever have another, but who knows? Maybe this will be a pivot into a consultancy role.
I decided to rub it in her face. I called her up and asked how things had gone on that front. She was suspicious because it was the first time I was hitting her up since the divorce started. She was giving short answers.
She was still waiting for a response, but she claimed to be optimistic. I told her not to be. I let her know I had heard that her competitor landed the contract. She said it wasn’t possible.
She was the only one the hotel chain had approached, and she was sure about that. I told her she clearly wasn’t sure if someone else had been awarded the contract. She hung up. She called her contact.
Ten minutes later, she called back fuming. She wanted to know if I had something to do with it. Just like she did when I confronted her about cheating, I didn’t have anything to say. The silence made it clear I was guilty.
She refused to believe it was that simple. She refused to believe she had truly lost the deal because of me. I made sure she believed it. I told her she didn’t deserve it.
I wasn’t going to sit around and watch her make a major windfall from a company that I had participated heavily in. A lot of my effort and finances had gone into it. Instead of taking ownership in her company, I let her have it for herself. Now I rolled back the progress that I had played a big part in.
I wanted to see her make the climb for herself. I know she can do it. She’s good at business. The problem is she might never get a job this juicy again.
This was the opportunity of a lifetime because it could have opened so many doors. But it ended up in the hands of her competitor. She said she was going to sue me. I told her she had no basis for that.
Even if there was a true legal basis, I know for a fact it won’t fly in our country. It simply won’t. The courts are easy to work if you know how to handle things. She knows that for a fact.
She was enraged on the phone, and it only gave me joy to hear her that angry. It finally felt like I had paid her back for cheating on me. I told her that. She tried to defend herself by claiming we both knew the marriage was over.
I pointed out that it was her cheating on me in the first place, somewhere near the start of the marriage, that led to that. She claimed weakly that she never cheated at the start. But we both knew that was a lie. Pissed off, I hung up.
She tried to call me back several times over the week, but I never picked up. We didn’t have any business together. I’m very happy to be done with her. I feel like this was the closure I needed.
And instead of her getting a paycheck after the divorce, it was me. Not too bad, I’d say. The part that makes me laugh is that she seemed perfectly comfortable with the consequences when they were happening to me. Lose your marriage?
Deal with it. Lose your trust? Move on. Find out you’ve been used?
That’s life. But the second she lost something important, suddenly she wanted answers, explanations, accountability, and justice. Funny how that works. What I think really bothered her wasn’t the money.
It was finding out that the man she had written off as a sentimental fool was capable of hitting back. She thought she had already closed the chapter on me. Then she discovered I was still holding one of the pens.
