Reclaiming My Life

My wife got a boob job out of nowhere. Then she wouldn't let me touch her. Reach for her once and she'd bite my head off.

Until her phone lit up with a message.

Him: [Missing you, gorgeous. All of you. Same place this weekend?]

Everything in me went cold.

She'd spent my money, money I bled for, remaking her body. Not for me. For some pretty little nobody with a ring light and a following.

Chapter 1

My wife spent my money on a new body. Then she wouldn't let me near it.

Five years married, and every cent she had ever spent came out of my account. The newest chunk of it went into her chest. Perfect, expensive, magazine-grade. And the day it healed, she started flinching every time I reached for her.

Turned out the new body wasn't for me.

It was for a broke little TikTok streamer. Bleached hair, a face full of acne he smothered under ten filters. She was starving me and feeding him. With my money.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

That night, I didn't have any of it yet. Just a wife who used to be warm, and a feeling I couldn't put a name to.

Let me back up.

I came out of the shower to find her stretched across the bed, working lotion into her skin.

She glowed under the lamp. Loose hair, that body she'd paid for. My mouth went dry.

I crossed the room and slid my arms around her neck.

I barely leaned in before she shoved me off.

"What are you doing?" She didn't look up. "I'm not finished."

"You haven't let me touch you in weeks."

I tried anyway, dipping toward her.

Her whole face pinched. "I'm tired lately. I'm not in the mood for this."

So I stopped. I lay back against the headboard. "What's going on with you? Something at work? Your mom again?"

"God, just leave it." She capped the lotion and dropped it on the nightstand hard enough to rattle the lamp. "It's late. Go to sleep."

I killed the light.

I lay there in the dark, wide awake, my hand resting in the cold stretch of sheet between us.

Something had gone stiff between us, fast. She pulled back from my hands. She got short with me over nothing. Five years, and we'd been fine. Not fireworks, but fine. Then, out of nowhere, this.

I stared at the ceiling and ran the tape backward, hunting for the place it turned.

It lined up with the surgery.

My wife, Sabrina, used to be so buttoned-up it was almost old-fashioned. When we met, she zipped her jackets to her chin.

And then that woman announced she wanted her breasts done.

I laughed, because I thought she was joking. "You won't even get a wisdom tooth pulled. Now you want them cutting you open to pack silicone in?"

She didn't blink. "That's the price of looking good." She smiled. "Besides, I look better, you get to show me off. Everybody wins."

I told her she didn't need it. I told her more than once.

She had never been so sure of anything in her life. She booked a clinic inside a week.

And she made one thing very clear: she didn't want me there.

Back then, I told myself she was just shy about it.

I'm good with details. That's the one I should have looked at harder.

Chapter 2

After the surgery, she got colder by the day.

Post-op blues, maybe. That's what I told myself.

Then her phone lit up in the dark. The glow of it landed like a blade in that black room.

I reached over to kill the screen for her.

Him: [Missing you, gorgeous. All of you. Same place this weekend?]

Every drop of blood in me stopped moving.

The phone slid out of my hand and hit me in the chest before I remembered how to breathe. I picked it back up. My fingers didn't feel like mine.

I opened the thread.

It ran longer than I'd braced for. Screen after screen of things I'll spend the rest of my life trying to un-read, and buried in the middle, photos of my wife I'd give anything to burn out of my own skull.

Her: [Well? Happy with them?]

I tapped his profile.

Some small-time streamer. Bleached hair, skinny as a plucked bird, ten filters deep and you could still count the acne on his face.

Looking at him turned my stomach. Sabrina, apparently, felt differently.

The whole thread, she groveled. To him. To that con artist.

Her: [Baby, come shopping with me tomorrow?]

Her: [I miss you so much. You're the only thing that makes me feel alive.]

Her: [Got paid today. The second you go live, it's all yours.]

Every warm word she'd stopped giving me, she'd been feeding to him.

And payday? I checked. Her paydays fell on the exact days I moved money into her account.

She was taking what I earned and tipping it to him, dollar by dollar, a broke kid streaming for tips.

My wife was cheating on me. With my money.

And still, God help me, I reached for the excuse. Maybe it was only messages. Maybe nothing had happened in the real world.

I knew better. I wanted the marriage anyway, or the ghost of it.

I memorized his handle. I set her phone back down, screen dark, exactly where it had been, and I lay down like a man who hadn't seen a thing.

In the morning, I told her the office needed me out of town.

Her face lit up. Actually lit up.

There was my answer. The thing I'd been most afraid of was already true.

I left the apartment. I didn't leave.

I sat in my car with a clear line on our front door, pulse climbing, head empty.

She came down fast.

I followed her out of the complex and watched her flag a cab. It carried her clear across the city, to the biggest mall we had. She climbed out, fixed her makeup with shaking hands, and paced the entrance wearing a look she hadn't aimed at me in months.

Then he showed up.

She went to him before he'd even cleared the crowd. Up on her toes, arms locked around his neck, a whole sidewalk of strangers between them and not one of them registering. Right there, in broad daylight, my wife kissed him like the street was empty.

My hand closed into a fist.

I stayed in the car.

I didn't get out and break his jaw. I did something colder.

I started keeping a record.

Chapter 3

They walked through the doors holding hands. I got out and followed.

Neither of them once considered that I might be behind them. They strolled, easy and loose, oblivious.

They hit the designer stores one after another, walking out with bags stacked up their arms. Sabrina swiped my card like it was nothing.

I made myself look at what she was buying. Menswear. All of it. Jackets, shoes, a watch. Men's.

In five years of marriage, my wife had given me exactly one gift. A keychain. Three dollars, off a folding table at a street market. She'd said it looked like me.

I never held it against her. She grew up with nothing. Careful with money. I understood.

I understood wrong. It wasn't that she couldn't spend. It was that she couldn't spend on me.

For him, the wallet flew open.

My phone buzzed with charge alerts, one after another. Her job was a low-effort thing that paid almost nothing, so the card was always mine. A man paying for his wife, that's how it's supposed to work.

A man's wife spending his money to put horns on his head is a different arrangement.

For half a second I wanted to walk in there and catch them in the act.

Then I thought better of it. Too easy. Too clean for the two of them.

When we got together, nobody gave us a chance. Father in prison for armed robbery. Mother a gambling addict with her hand always out. A little brother who skipped school to throw punches. The kind of family people crossed the street to avoid.

I took her hand anyway, sure love outran all of it. Every one of those words came back to slap me now.

Years of bending over backward for her whole family, telling myself it made me a good man. This was the thanks.

They shopped till noon. Then they went straight to a hotel.

I watched them step into the elevator with their arms around each other's waists, and something in my chest went to ash.

Fine. Time to deal with what was actually in front of me.

I pulled out my phone and called my buddy Wade.

"You free tonight? Let's get a drink. There's something I need from you."

It took a maze of turns to find the address Wade texted me.

The last few years had been good to him. He'd sunk his own money into a little bar and kept nagging me to come by. I'd always put him off. Sabrina would have read into it.

I found his booth. He already had two pretty girls tucked under his arms, waiting.

"What happened to Husband of the Year? Since when do you show up at a bar?"

I picked up the glass on the table and drained it. Waited for the burn to climb my throat and settle. Then I waved the girls out.

"I think my wife's sleeping with another man."

Chapter 4

"What?" Wade sat up. "I always said she wasn't the settling-down type. Marry a girl like that and God knows what she'd pull. See? What did I tell you."

Then his face went hard. "That little punk slept with my brother's wife? Give me a name. I'll break him in half."

I looked at the ring I'd worn for years, sitting on my finger like it still meant something. The anger in me ran hotter than his. The only reason I was calm was that I was still holding it down.

"Tell me what you want," Wade said. "Whatever it is, it's done."

"Find out who he is."

I pulled up the streamer's profile and turned the screen to him.

"This is the guy?" Wade squinted. "He's nothing to look at."

I didn't answer. I didn't need to.

Wade worked fast. That same night, a file landed on my phone.

Brayden. Twenty-seven. Never made it past the eighth grade. A theft conviction, a stretch inside to go with it. Out now, posting the kind of try-hard dance clips that somehow caught fire online.

Nothing to look at, sure. But he had a sweet mouth and knew how to use it, and it had reeled in a whole stable of bored, wealthy women who kept him afloat, tipping hard every time he went live.

My wife was one of them.

I read it twice, line by line, and each line sat a little colder than the last.

"Can you pull the other women too?"

"Already on it. I've got people digging. Tomorrow at the latest."

I hung up and went back to the file, word by word.

Past eleven, and Sabrina still wasn't home.

I called to test her. The line died almost before it rang.

I called again. And again. Finally she picked up.

"What?" Her voice came through thick with irritation. "I was asleep."

Under it, I could hear her working to catch her breath. The middle of the night, and she was winded. I didn't need it spelled out.

"Are you home right now?" I kept my voice flat and even.

"Where else would I be at this hour?"

I had to hand it to her. She lied straight to my face without a crack in her voice, righteous about it, and if I hadn't been standing in our bedroom staring at an empty bed, I might have bought every word.

"Let's video chat. I miss you."

"No. I'm going to sleep."

"You're home, though. Right?"

She hissed like a cat with its tail underfoot. "God, what is wrong with you? I'm home. Why can't you just trust me? Forget it. I'm going to sleep."

She hung up fast, guilt in every second of it.

I set the phone down. I tapped one finger against the table and looked at the empty half of the bed.

She thought the lie had landed.

It had. On a man sitting alone in the dark, holding everything he needed to end her, waiting for the sun to come up. Starting tonight, every step she took was one I'd already laid the ground under.

Chapter 5