40 Years of Betrayal

For forty years, my wife had been deceiving me.

I sat there, frozen on the couch, flipping through the stack of remittance slips, each one a punch to the gut as I slowly came to grips with the truth. The slips ranged from handwritten notes to printed forms, and I looked over them again and again.

What hit me was undeniable: Since the day we got married, forty years ago, my wife had been secretly sending money to some unknown account.

Finally, I found the first page in the stack.

Back in 1984, Megan Gibson and I had gotten married. The marriage was set up by our parents. We'd barely known each other for two months before tying the knot. After the wedding, she quit her job and stayed home to run the house.

I'd always been touched by her sacrifice. I promised myself I'd work hard and give her the best life I could.

Then luck struck, and I landed a job as a university lecturer. I couldn't wait to tell her, so I rushed home, all excited, and handed her an envelope.

The envelope, still warm from my pocket, held twenty dollars—the first money I'd earned for our little family.

"Megan, it's not much, but it's all I have. Use it to buy what we need for the house. I don't want you to go without," I told her.

She looked at me, her eyes brimming with tears.

I was just a poor scholar back then, rich in knowledge but poor in cash. When she married me, we didn't even have a proper dining table. We had to push two chairs together to eat.

I always felt like I owed her so much. The moment I got my first paycheck, I told her to buy furniture, so she wouldn't feel embarrassed when her family visited.

But she wouldn't spend it on herself. Instead, she bought me a suit.

When she handed it to me, I could hardly hold back my tears.

"It's the latest style from the department store," she said.

I wore it to work with pride. A colleague made a comment that it was a knockoff, but I brushed it off. I figured they were just jealous.

What I didn't know was that the first time I handed my salary to Megan, she'd already sent most of it to that mysterious account.

To cover her tracks, she'd bought the suit for less than two dollars from a street vendor.

Turns out, from the very beginning, there was always someone else in our marriage. The forty years I thought I'd spent building something real with her were nothing more than a cruel joke made up of lies.

I couldn't stop torturing myself, flipping through those remittance slips until one caught my eye. It had a handwritten note on it:

"To help him become a millionaire, keep working hard!"

It was from August 1989. Our son, Tommy Chandler had just been born.

At the time, Megan had apologized, saying she'd foolishly followed bad advice and lost all our money in a failed investment. We'd had two thousand dollars saved up the previous month, but now we were down to just two hundred.

She couldn't produce enough milk, and our son was often hungry and crying. I had to feed him porridge, and he turned pale and malnourished. We couldn't even afford a two-dollar can of formula.

When I suggested she get a part-time job, she snapped at me for the first time.

"Why can't he eat this? Back in my day, we didn't have formula and we got by just fine! And don't forget—it was your decision for me to quit my job and stay home in the first place!"

Beside the October remittance for that year, another handwritten note appeared:

"He became the first millionaire in town. He looks even more handsome now."

To help him reach his millionaire dream, our son nearly starved to death.

But who was he?

My gaze turned to the cabinet that Megan had always forbidden me to touch. My hands were shaking as I opened it.

Inside was a framed photo, carefully preserved.

It was a picture of Megan with her first love.