My Mother Demanded I Divorce My Husband And Give Him Our House Because He Got My Sister Pregnant. Little Do They Know, I’m A Cfo And Have Already Secured The Assets. How Do I Tell Them They’re Now Trespassing On My Property?

The Audit Begins

I wasn’t 16 anymore. I didn’t depend on them for shelter or love. I was a CFO. I managed millions of dollars. I fired incompetent people for a living. And as I sat in my house that night staring at the ceiling, I realized my family was a bad investment, a toxic asset, and it was time to liquidate.

The next morning I woke up in a cold, empty bed. For a split second, I reached for Greg, a muscle memory expecting his warmth. Then reality crashed down like a physical blow. He wasn’t there. He was probably with her.

I dragged myself out of bed and walked into his home office—or rather, his gaming room that we called an office to preserve his dignity. When I met Greg, he was a realtor. Not the most successful, but he had charm. He had potential. I was drawn to his easygoing nature, which balanced my intensity. He was the dreamer; it seemed like a good match.

But as my career took off, his stagnated. I made partner at my firm, the market crashed, and he didn’t sell a house for a year.

“It’s okay,”

I told him.

“I make enough for both of us. Take a break. Figure out what you really want to do.”

That was my mistake. I gave him a cushion and he decided to take a 5-year nap on it. He rebranded himself as a business consultant. It was a vague title that meant he spent all day on LinkedIn and message boards, occasionally meeting a buddy for lunch to workshop ideas that never materialized.

He stopped contributing to the mortgage. Then he stopped paying utility bills. Then he stopped buying groceries. Slowly, insidiously, I became the sole provider. I didn’t mind the money at first—I loved him. But I minded his attitude.

The less he earned, the more arrogant he became. It was a defense mechanism. I knew he felt small, so he had to act big. He started criticizing my spending.

“Do you really need another designer suit, Veronica?”

he’d ask while wearing the $5,000 watch I bought him.

“You’re so materialistic. You work too much. You’re losing touch with what’s important.”

What was important, apparently, was him.

I walked over to his desk. It was a mess of papers and unopened mail. I started sifting through it. A past-due notice for a credit card I didn’t know he had. A speeding ticket. And then a brochure for a luxury resort in Miami Beach. I froze. I recognized the resort. I had been there for a corporate retreat 6 months ago. Greg had stayed home because he had an “important meeting.”

I went to my laptop and pulled up our joint account statement, the one I funded every month for household expenses. There it was. A charge for two plane tickets to Miami, the dates coinciding with my work trip. And a charge for a deluxe king room.

He had taken her there while I was in boardrooms closing the deals that paid for our life. He was drinking cocktails on the beach with my sister on my dime. I felt sick. It wasn’t just the sex; it was the financing of the betrayal. He had made me pay for my own humiliation.

I kept digging. I looked at the cash withdrawals. $300 here, $200 there. “Consulting expenses” he’d note in our budgeting app. But looking at the dates: August 12th, Barbara’s birthday. September 5th, the day Barbara’s car broke down. October 31st…

He had been subsidizing her life for years, not months. Years.

“You make me feel small,”

he told me at our last anniversary dinner—the real one, not last night’s disaster.

“You walk around like you own the place just because you signed the checks.”

“I don’t mean to,”

I’d replied, feeling guilty.

“I just want us to be stable.”

“Stable isn’t sexy, Veronica,”

he’d sneered.

“Need is sexy. You don’t need me.”

He was right. I didn’t need him. But Barbara did. Barbara was a bottomless pit of need. She needed money, she needed validation, she needed someone to rescue her. Greg couldn’t rescue himself, but he could pretend to rescue Barbara using my resources. It was a parasitic symbiosis. He got to feel like a big man and she got a free ride.

I slammed the laptop shut. My sadness was evaporating, replaced by a cold, sharp clarity. This wasn’t a tragedy; it was a robbery.

I looked around the room at the things I had bought him: the top-of-the-line gaming computer, the ergonomic chair, the autographed Michael Jordan jersey on the wall. He was a leech. A handsome, charming, gaslighting leech. And he had made a fatal mistake. He thought because I was generous, I was stupid. He thought because I loved him, I wasn’t checking the accounts.

But I’m a CFO. I check everything.