Looking at it now, I feel kind of stupid. We’ve had separate accounts since we got married, his idea. Said it was more practical. But I trusted him with the joint savings. That’s where most of my paychecks went, building our future, he called it. Yeah, right.
I found out he’d been taking Aurora to all these fancy places. Not super expensive, but definitely more than we usually spend, like that new fusion restaurant downtown, where appetizers are $15 each. Meanwhile, he’d complain when I’d spend $50 at Target on household stuff we actually needed.
The weird part? When I was going through our papers, amazing how much stuff you accumulate in 15 years, I found receipts from places I’ve never been to. Small things. Coffee shops near her apartment. Movie tickets from dates I wasn’t on. He wasn’t even trying to hide them well, just stuck them in a drawer with all our other paperwork.
Vivian’s been helping me sort through everything. She works at a bank, so she knows what to look for.
“Classic financial abuse,” she called it.
Though that term feels too dramatic for what happened to me. I just feel dumb, like I should have noticed sooner.
The most bizarre thing happened yesterday at Walmart. I was getting some basic stuff, toothpaste, shampoo, you know, and ran into James’s cousin, Mato. Instead of being awkward, he actually helped me pick out a cheap printer for scanning documents. He told me James had done similar stuff to his high school girlfriend. Would have been nice to know that 15 years ago, but whatever.
James keeps calling. Not as much as before, down to maybe five to six times a day now. The messages switched from angry to weirdly concerned.
“Just worried about you handling the bills,” he texted yesterday.
As if I haven’t been paying my own phone bill this whole time.
Aurora sent me a message on Facebook. Nothing dramatic, just a “we should talk sometime.” I left her on read. What’s there to talk about? She knew he was married. She’s not some innocent victim here.