He stood there, jaw tight and shoulders rigid, staring at the receipts as if I had planted them to trap him.
“I’m not doing this,” he finally said. “You’re blowing this out of proportion.”
“Blowing it out of proportion?” I asked, my voice rising. “Troy, money has been disappearing from our account, and you went to that hotel at least once in the last few months without telling me. You’re up to something. What is it?”
“I trusted you. I really did, but you aren’t giving me any clues.”
He shook his head. “I can’t do this right now.”
“You can’t, or you won’t?”
He didn’t answer.
I slept in the guest room that night. I asked him to explain it to me again the next morning, but he refused.
“I can’t live with that lie,” I said. “I can’t wake up every day and pretend I don’t see what’s happening.”
Troy nodded once. “I figured you’d say that.”
So I called a lawyer.
I didn’t want to. God, I didn’t want to, but I couldn’t wake up every day wondering where my husband was.
I couldn’t look at our bank account and watch the money vanish into places I wasn’t allowed to ask about.
***
Two weeks later, we sat across from each other in a lawyer’s office.
Troy wouldn’t look at me; he barely spoke and didn’t even try to fight for our marriage. He simply nodded at the right moments and signed where he was told.
That was it.
A lifetime of friendship and thirty-six years of marriage—all of it gone with a single piece of paper.
