My Husband’s Best Friend Toasted To Me As “The Temporary One” At Our 3rd Anniversary Dinner. I Just Found The “Future Plans” Folder For His Ex In His Locked Desk. How Do I Get My Revenge?

The Departure

We’re almost done loading the last box when David’s car pulls into the driveway. The engine cuts off and I freeze with my hand on the SUV door. My sister stops midstep carrying a bag of my shoes. Dominic keeps walking toward the car like nothing’s wrong, but I can see his shoulders tense up.

David gets out and stares at the loaded vehicle and all my stuff packed inside. His face goes through about five different expressions before settling on shocked. He walks toward me with his keys still in his hand.

“Where are you going?”

I close the SUV door and turn to face him.

“Somewhere I’m not considered temporary.”

His mouth opens but nothing comes out for a second. He looks at the boxes and bags and then back at me.

“You can’t just leave. We need to talk about this.”

Dominic comes back for the last box sitting on the porch. It’s the one with my books and photo albums. David moves to block him from picking it up.

“We need to talk about this before she makes any rash decisions.”

Dominic sets down the box he was carrying from the house and looks at David. His voice stays completely calm, but there’s something underneath it that makes the hair on my arm stand up.

“Step aside.”

David doesn’t move at first. He’s taller than Dominic, but Dominic has this look on his face that says he’s done being polite.

“I said step aside.”

David moves. He actually steps back and lets Dominic pick up the box. I watch my husband back down from another man in our own driveway and feel absolutely nothing. Dominic loads the final box and closes the SUV hatch. My sister gets in the driver’s seat and starts the engine. I’m about to get in when I realize I need to ask him something.

I turn back to David who’s standing there looking lost.

“Did you ever actually love me, or was I just convenient?”

He opens his mouth right away like he’s going to say, “Of course he loved me.” But then he stops. He looks at me, and I can see him trying to figure out what answer will make this better. The seconds stretch out. 5 seconds. 10 seconds. 15. My sister leans out the window.

“Jennifer, we need to go.”

David finally speaks, but I’m already climbing into the SUV. My sister pulls out of the driveway before I can hear whatever excuse he’s about to make. I don’t look back at the house. I don’t look at David standing in the driveway. I just watch the street ahead of us and try to remember how to breathe.

Saki’s Loft

Saki’s downtown loft takes up the entire top floor of an old converted warehouse. The guest room is bigger than the bedroom I shared with David. It has huge windows that look out over the city and exposed brick walls and hardwood floors that shine in the afternoon light.

Saki and Dominic bring up my boxes while I stand in the middle of the room trying to process that this is where I live now. They set up my stuff without asking me where things should go. Saki hangs my clothes in the closet. Dominic puts my books on the built-in shelves. My sister makes the bed with sheets Saki pulled from a linen closet that’s bigger than my old bathroom.

When everything is unpacked, they leave me alone. The door closes, and I’m standing in this beautiful room that doesn’t feel like mine. I lie down on the bed and stare at the ceiling. The paint has a texture pattern that looks like waves. I follow the lines with my eyes and try to figure out who I am without David.

I was Jennifer who worked in marketing and liked coffee with too much cream. Then I became Jennifer who was married to David. Now I’m Jennifer who got left for an ex-fiancée. Except David hasn’t actually left me yet because the ex-fiancée hasn’t arrived yet. I’m Jennifer who found out at her anniversary dinner that her husband calls her temporary.

I close my eyes, but I can still see Lucas’s face when he said it. That casual smile like he was commenting on the weather. I can see David cutting his steak and not looking at me. I can see the ring on my finger that suddenly felt like it weighed nothing at all.

That evening, Saki knocks on the door and brings in a plate of food. Pasta with vegetables and chicken. It smells good, but my stomach feels like it’s been replaced with concrete. She sits on the edge of the bed while I pick at a piece of chicken.

“My first marriage ended badly too.”

I look up at her. I didn’t know Saki had been married before Dominic. She’s always seemed so put together and happy.

“He cheated with my sister. Found out when I came home early from a work trip.”

I set down my fork.

“That’s horrible.”

She shrugs.

“It was 10 years ago. Feels like a different lifetime now.”

She watches me push pasta around on my plate.

“The person you are right now—completely broken—isn’t the person you’ll be in 6 months. I promise you that.”

I want to believe her, but I can’t imagine feeling normal again. I can’t imagine waking up and not immediately remembering that my husband has been planning to leave me since before we even got married.

“How did you get through it?”

Saki thinks for a minute.

“I let myself fall apart for a while. Then I started putting myself back together piece by piece. Some days I could only manage one piece. Some days I couldn’t manage any pieces at all. But eventually, I had enough pieces back together that I could function again.”

She stands up and takes my plate even though I’ve barely eaten anything.

“You don’t have to be okay right now. You just have to survive today. Tomorrow you can survive tomorrow.”

The Financial Split

The next morning, I call Miles Carver. My sister found him through someone she went to law school with. His assistant answers and I explain that I need a divorce attorney. She asks if I can come in today, and I almost laugh because yes, I can definitely come in today since I took the entire week off work. But she says the earliest appointment is in 3 days, Wednesday at 2:00 in the afternoon.

I write it down even though I know I’ll remember. 3 days feels like forever, but also not nearly enough time to prepare for officially ending my marriage. I spend those 3 days going through my bank accounts on my laptop. David and I have a joint checking account and a joint savings account. I look at the balances and realize how much I’ve been depending on his salary.

We put both our paychecks into the joint account, but his is almost double mine. The savings account has $42,000 in it. I contributed maybe $12,000 of that over 3 years. The rest is David’s money—money he earned while planning to leave me. I open my own accounts and see my retirement fund and the small savings account I had before we got married. I have maybe $8,000 that’s completely mine. It’s not nothing, but it’s not enough to start over.

I feel sick looking at the numbers. I never thought about what it meant to make less money than David. I never thought about what would happen if we split up and I had to support myself on just my salary. I was stupid. I trusted him completely, and that was stupid.

My sister comes over on Tuesday morning. We drive to a bank downtown that’s not the one David and I use. The woman who helps us open my new account is maybe 60 with reading glasses on a chain. She doesn’t ask why I’m opening a solo account when I already have joint accounts. She just processes the paperwork and sets up my new checking and savings.

My sister helps me calculate how much of our joint savings is actually mine. We figure out my contributions versus David’s contributions. It comes out to about $14,000 when you factor in three years of deposits. I transfer $14,000 from our joint savings into my new savings account. The transaction takes less than 5 minutes. $14,000 moves from one account to another with a few clicks on the bank woman’s computer.

David calls me 2 hours later. I watch his name light up my phone screen. It rings four times before going to voicemail. He calls back immediately. This time I answer.

“You stole from me.”

I don’t say anything.

“You took money out of our savings account. That’s theft, Jennifer.”

I look at my sister who’s sitting across from me at Saki’s kitchen table. She nods.

“I took my portion of the savings. I contributed $14,000 over 3 years. That’s what I transferred.”

David’s voice gets louder.

“That money was for our future. You can’t just take it because you’re mad at me.”

I hang up. He calls back three more times. I block his number. My sister high-fives me across the table. It feels good to block him. It feels like taking back some tiny piece of control.