Chapter 3

That afternoon, I didn't go back to the apartment.

I sat in my hotel room and did one thing.

I crunched the numbers.

How much money had I poured into this marriage over the past three years?

The down payment came to 230 thousand dollars.

One hundred sixty thousand of that was five years of my own savings, and my parents gave me the other seventy thousand.

David didn't contribute a dime.

He had told me, "You pay the down payment, I'll take care of the renovations."

When the renovations started, he threw in 17 thousand dollars, and it wasn't close to enough.

So I covered the remaining 58 thousand dollars myself.

The renovation bill came to seventy-five thousand dollars in the end.

The mortgage was 3,300 dollars a month. I paid 2,300 and he paid 900.

In three years, I had put in eighty-three thousand dollars, and he had put in thirty-two thousand.

And then there were the appliances and the furniture.

We needed a TV, a fridge, a washer, air conditioning, a couch, a dining table, and a bed.

That came to another 37 thousand dollars.

Every cent came out of my pocket.

"You picked it, so you pay for it. My taste is terrible anyway," he said.

I pulled out my calculator.

The down payment was 230 thousand, the renovations fifty-eight thousand, the mortgage eighty-three thousand, and the furniture and appliances thirty-seven thousand.

It came to 400 thousand dollars.

And that did not count the utilities, the HOA fees, the groceries, or all the small things that added up.

I looked at that number for a long time.

That was what I had sunk into this so-called "home."

And what about him?

He had put 17 thousand into renovations and 32 thousand toward the mortgage.

That came to 50 thousand dollars.

Then he took the money out of our joint account.

He sent forty thousand dollars to his mistress, month after month.

And he dropped 130 thousand dollars in one shot to set her up with a flower shop.

That came to 170 thousand dollars.

He had put fifty thousand dollars into this home over three years.

He had spent 170 thousand dollars on her in two.

I stared at the numbers on the calculator.

Four hundred thousand dollars on my side, and fifty thousand on his.

And 170 thousand dollars had gone to a woman I had never met.

And then I remembered something.

Last Christmas, I wanted to buy a coat.

It had cost 1,600 dollars.

David said, "That's way too expensive. We've got the mortgage to pay."

So I didn't buy it.

He bought her 1,300 dollars worth of jewelry.

He did that every month.

I thought about the 4 a.m. alarm before every business trip.

I got up before sunrise to catch the earliest flight.

Starbucks at the airport cost twelve dollars, so I always brought coffee from home.

On the train, I stayed up past midnight revising proposals, because finishing that project meant a 5,000 dollar bonus.

I thought I was working myself to the bone to save for our family.

It turned out that all the money I scraped together had been funding someone else's life.

I closed my laptop.

I picked up my phone.

I sent David a text.

[The project got pushed back. I won't be home this week. Probably not until next Wednesday.]

He answered within seconds.

David: [Okay, honey. You work so hard. Hang in there.] The message came with a kissing emoji.

I stared at his kiss emoji.

Then I deleted the thread.

Then I opened Instagram and put up a story.

[Back-to-back trips. Probably not home until next Wednesday. Missing my own bed.]

I attached an airport photo.

It was one I'd saved from a previous trip.

I set the story to Close Friends, and I put exactly one name on the list.

David was the only person on earth who could see it.

I wanted to let him see it.

Let him relax.

He could go on believing I was three hundred miles away.

And he could keep bringing that woman into my home.

Rachel was right.

Changing the locks was just the first step.

I needed to set the stage.

I wanted everyone to see his true colors.