The smell of bleach is what I remember most about those years. It was the scent of my second job, the one I went to after my 9-to-5 shift ended. I would come home at midnight, my hands raw and red, smelling of industrial cleaner, too tired to even eat.
Mark would be on the couch, looking at a stack of overdue bills with a pained expression.
“I’m sorry, babe,” he would sigh, rubbing his temples. “I just don’t know how we’re going to make rent. The freelance market is dead.”
I would comfort him. I would tell him it was okay, that I would pick up an extra shift on Saturday. We struggled for money for years. We lived on the razor’s edge of eviction. We ate ramen. We turned off the heat in winter and wore coats inside. I worked two jobs to keep us afloat, believing we were partners in a noble fight against bad luck.
He said he was broke, and I believed him because I loved him. I saw his empty wallet. I saw his “rejected” job applications.
When the marriage finally collapsed under the weight of the stress, I felt like a failure. I thought poverty had killed our love.
Then came the discovery phase of the divorce. My lawyer called me into his office. He didn’t look sad; he looked angry.
“Sarah,” he said, sliding a bank statement across the desk. “You need to see this.”
It was a statement from a bank in the Cayman Islands. It was in Mark’s name.
During the divorce discovery, my lawyer found an offshore account with $300,000 in it.
I stared at the zeros. Three hundred thousand dollars.
While I was taping my shoes together because I couldn’t afford new ones, he had a fortune. While I was crying over the electric bill, he was checking his interest rates.
He had been hiding money for years.
The betrayal wasn’t the money itself; it was the sadism of it. He had treated our life like a reality show where he was the secret millionaire and I was the contestant he was testing. He had watched me scrub floors to pay the electric bill while he sat on a fortune he planned to take with him. He had let me break my back to subsidize a struggle that didn’t exist, hoarding his wealth for a future that didn’t include me.
