She said my ex-husband had been telling my daughter for months that he’d never touched that nurse until after the divorce papers were signed. That night, my daughter found out he’d been paying the nurse’s rent while we were still married — from the same joint account he kept claiming was “almost empty.”
I drove over there in pajama pants because my daughter could barely get words out. She was sitting on her kitchen floor with her phone plugged into the wall, crying so hard she kept dropping it. Apparently she’d confronted him after seeing bank transfers going back nearly a year before my surgery even happened.
And the worst part wasn’t even the cheating.
It was that he’d used my recovery to get close to her. Invited her over when I was asleep upstairs. Told her I was “emotionally unstable” and needed extra help because I was pushing him away. That poor girl looked twenty-two at most when she started working for us.
My daughter kept saying, “Mom, I made you sit across from her. I thought you were being dramatic about Dad.”
I didn’t know what to say to that.
Three days later, my ex came pounding on my apartment door wanting “one calm family conversation.” My daughter opened the door before I could even stand up from the couch and told him, “You don’t get to use Mom’s illness as your midlife crisis story anymore.”
Then she shut the door in his face.
I heard his truck sit outside another ten minutes before he finally drove away. We haven’t seen him since Christmas.