My Marriage: His Debt to Another Woman Chapter 25

My Marriage: His Debt to Another Woman Chapter 25

Elara was pregnant. I was going to be a father.

I thought that would be my anchor, the thing that would keep her with me.

Instead, she left faster than I could have imagined, and I couldn’t catch up.

Chloe was a constant whisper in my ear, insisting Elara had planned it all, that the pregnancy might not even be real.

In the past, I would have listened. This time, her voice just grated on my nerves.

Elara was gone. Through her lawyer, she made it clear that she would not be coming back.

That’s when the real panic set in.

I went to find her, desperate to explain everything, to make her understand. But she was a wall of ice. Every time I brought up Chloe, every time I tried to admit how wrong I’d been, she shut me down. She didn’t want to hear it.

We never had a real conversation.

I tried to find her a few more times.

It was during that period that I was diagnosed. Late-stage pancreatic cancer.

I bought gifts for her and the baby. A crib, tiny clothes, toys—everything I could think of. But she still wouldn’t open the door.

Through the solid wood, I told her I was sick. I told her there was nothing between me and Chloe but a mountain of guilt I could never seem to climb.

Her only reply came through the door.

“If you come back, we’ll move.”

That terrified me.

So I backed away.

When I got home, I hired someone to look into Chloe.

The things I learned made me sick with the knowledge of my own stupidity.

She had gotten close to her late husband on a bet with her sorority sisters. She’d used the same playbook on me. And all this time, I had treated her like a fragile victim.

To satisfy her manufactured grief, I had proposed to Elara.

Only then did I realize that proposing to Elara was the one thing I’d never regretted.

What I regretted was destroying our marriage with my own two hands.

It wasn’t that I was completely blind to the things Chloe did to Elara.

I had simply allowed them to happen.

I told myself they were small things, that Elara would tolerate them, just as she always had.

Now I knew that was no different from handing Chloe the knife myself.