PART 8 – The Property Deed
The papers on the small table seemed to stare at me from the twilight like tiny proofs of my total ruin. I felt a cold chill run down my spine. My wife—the woman with whom I had shared joy and sorrow for twenty-five years—sat there with a cold, calculating look I had never seen in her before.
"What do you mean by 'it's all mine'?" I asked, trying to reach for the deeds.
With a quick motion, she pulled the dossier back to her side of the table. "Exactly what I said. You thought you were being so financially clever when, in 2015, you transferred money to those secret accounts for your 'business trips' and your mistress. But you forgot one small detail: being married under community of property means that every euro you siphoned off legally belongs to me too. And what's more..."
She turned a page and pointed at a signature at the bottom of an official document.
"...you signed a power of attorney back then, when you thought I suspect nothing, for the refinancing of our primary home. You thought you were signing a business contract for your work, but in reality, you were giving me full control over all assets should there ever be any talk of divorce or fraud."
My breath caught in my throat. I remembered that evening in 2016—exactly a year after the affair had ended. I had had a headache, been tired of all the lying, and she had presented me with a stack of paperwork stating it was for tax filing. Blindly, terrified to death that she would notice anything of my infidelity, I had signed where she asked me to.
"You... you blackmailed me back then," I croaked out. "All these years you knew, and all these years you let me believe I was safe while slowly driving me into a corner."
"Not blackmailed," she corrected coolly. "Prepared. There is a big difference between taking revenge on a whim and planning justice with precision. You jeopardized our twenty-fifth wedding anniversary yourself today by showing up again with your secrets and your extramarital child. You thought you could tell me the truth as if it were a confession in church. But you misjudged who you were dealing with."
I stared at her, stunned by the iron discipline hidden behind this woman. All those years I had thought I was the strong player in our marriage, the breadwinner holding the strings. In reality, I had been merely a pawn on a board she had set up decades ago.
"And now what?" I asked despondently. "What happens to our house? Our savings? Our son?"
She slowly stood up from her chair, walked to the French doors, and looked out over the dark, flowing river where moonlight flickered.
"Our son will get his college fund, you don't need to worry about that," she said softly, without turning around. "But you are leaving our house tonight. Tomorrow at nine o'clock, the divorce papers will be ready at the lawyer's office. And that fifty thousand dollars for that girl? You can nicely go pay that yourself out of the last pennies you have left in your own name."
