My Ex-husband Threw A $10,000 Card At Me While Leaving Me For A Younger Woman. Seven Years Later, I Finally Checked The Balance. Why Was There $2 Million In The Account?
I buried my face in my hands, tears soaking my fingers. I had accused him of being callous, cruel, but his cruelty was filled with love.
He had planned everything, cleaning up any trace, enduring the humiliation of his rivals just to make sure that when I held that card, I would be the freest and richest woman. And he accepted walking away with empty hands, carrying a bad reputation and a physical pain no one knew about.
In the empty diner, the melancholic music of a singer-songwriter played from a speaker in the corner, making the atmosphere even more somber. Ethan took a sip of his black coffee; the bitterness seemed to wake him up to continue the unfinished story.
He looked at me with a certain curiosity inside. “Actually, that day he and I made a bet. A bet I lost spectacularly and he won, but with a broken heart.”
I lifted my swollen eyes to Ethan, my voice cracking. “A bet? You bet on my divorce?”
“Not on the divorce, but on the card,” Ethan shook his head, his voice tinged with sadness.
“When he gave you the card, I tried to stop him. I told him giving it to you like that was a humiliation, that you would never accept it or that you’d pick it up just to throw it back at him. Your pride is bigger than a cathedral. I told him, ‘Your dignity is everything. How could you accept money from the man who betrayed you?'”
I fell silent. Ethan was right.
At that moment, my dignity was the only thing I had to hold on to. If Daniel had given me the money kindly, I probably would have thrown it in his face.
But he tossed it on the ground. He used the most hurtful words to provoke me, causing me to keep it as a trophy of my hatred.
Ethan continued, “Daniel laughed and told me, ‘You don’t know my wife. Laura is stubborn, but she’s also very practical. I have to make her hate me. Hate me so much that she’ll want to keep that card to rub it in my face someday. But I’ll bet you anything she won’t spend a single cent. She’ll lock it away. She’ll starve, she’ll take a job washing dishes before she touches a dime of this bastard husband’s money.'”
“Did he… did he really say that?” I stammered, feeling a sharp pain in my chest.
He knew me perfectly. He knew my strong yet contradictory character.
“Yes, that’s what he said,” Ethan nodded.
“He said that money wasn’t for you to waste right away. It was the ultimate safety net. He wanted you to manage on your own, to stumble and get back up, to mature. Only when you were truly backed into a corner, when life had you cornered, would you remember the card. And at that moment, that money would be your savior, not a psychological burden.”
I thought back over the last seven years—the countless times I was broke, the times I picked up the card and put it down again. I thought I was doing it to maintain my dignity, to show Daniel I didn’t need him.
But in reality, I was just following the path he had laid out for me. He wanted me to be strong, to stand on my own two feet, but he also feared I would fall.
So he had secretly placed a soft cushion at the end of the road. “I lost,” Ethan smiled bitterly.
“I thought you’d spend the money or throw the card away. But you kept it for seven years, just as he predicted. He won, but the price was too high. He gambled with your misunderstanding and his own loneliness. Sometimes I’d ask him, ‘And what if Laura really does throw the card away?’ He would just smile sadly and say, ‘Then that’s my bad luck and she’ll have her own destiny. God will provide. I’m sure she won’t starve.'”
Hearing this, I couldn’t hold back and broke down crying. “Daniel, you idiot! The biggest con man in the world! You bet a whole fortune, all your love, on a game whose outcome you would never see.”
“You trusted my pride more than I trusted it myself. I thought I was getting revenge on you by living in misery, but in reality, I was just proving you right—that you loved me and knew me deeply.”
Leaving the diner, Ethan took me to an old apartment building on the outskirts, just a block from where I had lived in a rented room seven years ago. Yellowed walls were covered in moss, with iron bars on the windows jutting out chaotically.
The cry of a child and the cough of an old man drifted from the small windows. I walked down a dark, damp hallway where the smell of leftover food mixed with mildew turned my stomach.
“Daniel lived here?” I asked Ethan, unable to believe my eyes.
A man who had lived in a suburban house, driven luxury cars, and worn designer clothes like Daniel—how could he endure such a cramped and miserable place? Ethan didn’t turn around, just silently climbed the chipped steps.
“He moved here right after the divorce. He sold all his personal belongings, only keeping some old clothes. He said it was cheap here, that every dollar saved counted. And besides, it was close to you.”
My heart sank. Close to me.
So for seven years, while I thought he was in some paradise with his mistress, he was hiding in a dark corner right next to me. The geographical distance was only a few hundred yards, but the distance of misunderstanding was thousands of miles.
“I still rent this apartment. I pay every month to keep it just as it was,” Ethan said, stopping in front of a peeling blue wooden door with a rusty lock.
“I can’t bring myself to empty it because his last breaths are in here. He forbade me from telling anyone, especially you. He was afraid that if you saw him living like a rat, it would traumatize you for life.”
Ethan put the key in the lock. The metallic sound echoed in the silence.
The door swung open, releasing a gust of cold air and a strong smell of disinfectant. Even after seven years, that characteristic scent of illness seemed to have seeped into the wood, into every brick.
I stepped into the tiny apartment, barely 150 square feet, dark and suffocating. The furniture was desolate: a single iron bed with a worn mattress, a small plastic table, and a wooden chair with a broken leg propped up by a brick.
On the wall were sticky notes with schedules for taking medication, for injecting painkillers. In a corner was a pile of empty medicine boxes and dried IV bags.
This was where Daniel spent his last days. This wasn’t a place to live; it looked more like a tomb for someone waiting to die.
I touched the yellowed pillow, imagining Daniel lying here alone, fighting excruciating pain without family, without a wife—only four cold walls for company. On stormy nights while I was bundled under my blanket, old as it was, crying with self-pity, he was here.
He was gritting his teeth to endure every injection, every seizure, and the heart-wrenching longing for me. “He lived here for three months,” Ethan said, leaning against the doorframe, his voice choked.
“Three months of hell. He didn’t dare turn on the light for fear his shadow in the window would attract the neighbors’ attention. He walked on tiptoes. Even to cough, he would cover his mouth. He locked himself in the darkness, becoming a living ghost, all for fear that you might pass by chance and discover the truth.”
I fell to my knees on the cold floor, tears streaming uncontrollably. This sacrifice was too great, too cruel for him.
Why was he so foolish? Why did he choose the most painful way to protect me?
I would have preferred him to be selfish, to use that money for his treatment, to hire someone to care for him instead of enduring a life worse than death. I sat on the floor, letting the dust stain my new dress.
This apartment was like a time capsule, preserving Daniel’s loneliness and suffering. Ethan walked to the window and pulled back a coarse gray curtain.
The faint evening light streamed in, illuminating a strange object on the table pressed against the window. It was a pair of black high-powered military binoculars.
“Come look,” Ethan called to me, his voice heavy. “See how he was unfaithful to you? How he enjoyed himself, just as you imagined?”
