I Ruined My Ex-Husband and It Was Worth It

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‎Sarah

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‎The rain was fucking relentless that night.

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‎I remember gripping the steering wheel of my Range Rover, squinting through the windshield as sheets of water hammered against the glass. The highway was a goddamn nightmare, cars crawling at twenty miles per hour, I couldn't see shit, and my phone wouldn't stop buzzing with messages I didn't want to see.

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‎Marcus had texted me seventeen times.

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‎"Where the fuck are you?"

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‎"You're late for dinner with James and Victoria."

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‎"Don't embarrass me again, Sarah."

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‎The last one made me grip the wheel harder. Embarrass him. As if showing up late to a dinner party was the same as him staying out until 3 AM on "business calls" that ended with lipstick on his collar and the smell of Chanel No. 5 that I definitely didn't wear.

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‎I was pregnant. Six months pregnant with our first child, and my husband was having an affair.

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‎I'd known for two weeks. I'd found the texts on his iPad when I was looking for flight information. Texts between Marcus and Victoria—my best friend since college, the woman who'd helped me build my interior design business from nothing, the woman I'd trusted with my fucking life.

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‎"Can't wait to feel you inside me again," Victoria had written.

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‎"Your husband is fucking oblivious," Marcus had responded.

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‎I'd read those messages in my bathroom while sitting on the toilet at three in the morning, and something inside me had broken like a bone snapping clean.

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‎I sat on the bathroom floor that night, my back against the cold tile, and I'd called Victoria.

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‎"Hey," she'd answered, her voice thick with sleep. "Everything okay? Is it the baby?"

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‎I'd swallowed hard, staring at the damning words on the screen. "I just... I had a weird dream. That Marcus was being unfaithful. It felt so real."

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‎There was a beat of silence on the line, Then her laugh. "Sarah, you're hormonal and paranoid. Marcus adores you. He's just stressed with the new investors. Go back to sleep."

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‎"You're right," I'd whispered. "Sorry for waking you."

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‎"Always here for you," she'd said. The last words my best friend ever said to me.

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‎I made a plan that night. A plan that would change everything.

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‎I couldn't confront him. Couldn't divorce him. Because Marcus was rich, like generationally wealthy and his lawyers would bury me. He'd take the business I'd built from nothing, take my child, take everything, and I'd end up with a studio apartment and partial custody of a baby I couldn't afford to raise.

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‎But if he thought I was dead?

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‎Everything changed.

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‎So I'd done something insane. I'd hired a fixer a woman named Diane who knew how to disappear people and we'd planned the perfect accident. A car crash at night, on a rainy stretch of the highway where accidents happened constantly. A body that couldn't be identified immediately. A narrative that was absolutely fucking perfect.

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‎The car I was driving wasn't mine. It was a rental in a false name, identical to my Range Rover. The mannequin in the driver's seat professionally built to my size, dressed in my clothes, wearing my jewelry would be burnt beyond recognition when the fire trucks arrived.

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‎I was supposed to be found in that wreckage tomorrow morning.

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‎But I was going to be very much alive.

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‎The other car hit me doing sixty miles per hour.

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‎I'd coordinated the timing perfectly, a semi-truck that Diane had arranged, driven by a man who knew exactly what he was doing. The impact sent my car spinning across three lanes, and I felt the rush of adrenaline.

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‎The airbag deployed. I disconnected my seatbelt. The car doors unlocked automatically.

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‎And I ran.

‎I ran through the rain, away from the wreckage, away from the semi-truck that was screeching to a halt. I ran toward the dark stretch of shoulder where a black sedan was waiting, engine running, lights off.

‎I threw myself into the passenger seat, and Diane stepped on the gas without saying a word.

‎In the rearview mirror, I could see emergency lights starting to flash on the horizon. The ambulances were coming. The fire trucks were coming, and by the time they arrived, they'd find my car a burning, twisted heap of metal. They'd find the mannequin burned beyond recognition. And they'd find my identification in the wreckage.‎

‎They'd think I was dead.

‎And Marcus would think he was finally free.

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