Chapter 2 - The Gift and the Duplicate
The next morning, the Manhattan sunlight cut harshly through the bedroom blinds, and Ethan finally bothered to look up at the date marked on his desk calendar. He went completely white. The panic of a guilty man caught red-handed washed over his features, and he immediately dropped to his knees in front of me on the rug, profusely apologizing, begging for my forgiveness, and swearing on his life that Vanessa meant nothing to him.
To seal his hollow performance, he pulled out a pristine shopping bag from a luxury boutique on Fifth Avenue and handed me an extremely expensive designer handbag—the exact one I had paused to glance at for barely a couple of seconds in a fashion magazine months earlier. He canceled all his morning meetings, insisted on taking me to an exclusive private country club outside New York City, and spent hours whispering sweet promises, reminding me how much he supposedly loved me.
For a fleeting, foolish second, sitting there across from him in the sunlit pavilion, I almost managed to believe him.
Until three o’clock in the afternoon.
Ethan’s phone buzzed against the table surface with a sharp, insistent vibration. He glanced at the screen, his expression tightening. "It’s an emergency down at the corporate office, honey. I’m so sorry. I have to run, but I’ll be back before dinner, I promise."
He kissed my cheek hastily and rushed off toward his car. I sat alone at the table for thirty minutes, slowly sipping my tea. Then, my own phone buzzed with a notification from Instagram.
Vanessa had just posted a new photo.
The image showed a polished marble table inside a high-end cafe downtown. Resting upon it was a designer handbag identical in every single detail to the one Ethan had gifted me that very morning. The only difference between them was the color.
Hovering right above the photo was a short, smug caption: “I got spoiled today.”
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I stared down at the gift Ethan had given me for our anniversary morning, watching the way the afternoon light hit the expensive leather clasp. Then, without a word of anger, without a single tear, I stood up, walked back to our house, and placed the bag straight at the very back of my master closet, burying it beneath winter coats where it would never see the light of day again.
At that exact moment, the last lingering illusion of my marriage dissolved into dust. I finally realized that someone was actively trying to tear apart the life I had worked so hard to build. What none of them—neither Ethan, nor his manipulative mother Diane, nor his ambitious little mistress—imagined in their wildest, most arrogant dreams was that I had already decided to stop fighting for a broken home. And they still had absolutely no idea what financial and legal storm I was about to unleash upon them.
