I lost my gold earrings. Two days later, I met my neighbor in the elevator, and she was wearing them.
She said, “My boyfriend gifted me those earrings.” I told her they were vintage and had belonged to my husband’s grandma.
She was quiet. When I told my husband, he suddenly became pale. Turned out…
He’d given them to her himself.
I’ll never forget the way he looked when I said her name—Danika. He didn’t even try to hide it, just stared at the floor like it would open and swallow him whole.
We’d been married eight years. Together since college. I thought we were solid. We had this rhythm—dinners together, Sunday walks, inside jokes no one else got. I thought that meant something.
But apparently, it didn’t stop him from slipping heirloom earrings out of my jewelry box and giving them to the woman who lived one floor above us.
I remember laughing. Not the good kind. The stunned, slightly hysterical kind. Like my brain didn’t know what else to do.
He said it “just happened.” That it had been a few months. That he didn’t mean for me to find out like this.
Oh, so you meant for me to never know?
Danika was about twenty-seven, a fitness instructor with perfect skin and a permanent tan. I was thirty-four, a copy editor with two gray hairs and knees that popped every time I crouched.
I hated that I instantly compared myself to her.
I hated even more that I had to see her every day in the damn elevator. She barely looked at me after that. Once, she mumbled “sorry,” like she was apologizing for stepping on my toe, not for wearing my dead grandmother-in-law’s jewelry.
I didn’t know what to do.
For two days, I walked around numb. I didn’t cry. I just cleaned. I wiped every surface in the apartment like I was trying to scrub the betrayal off the walls. I didn’t even yell at my husband—Niall. I needed to figure out what hurt more: the cheating or the theft.
It was both.
On the third day, my best friend Becca came over. She took one look at me and said, “You’re scaring me. Either you tell me what’s going on, or I’m staging an intervention.”
I told her everything. She listened, wide-eyed, shaking her head like she couldn’t believe it either.
Then she asked, “What are you gonna do?”
I didn’t know.
Part of me wanted to pack up and leave. But then what? Start over in some tiny studio apartment while they lived upstairs in our home?
No. I wasn’t ready to give up that easily.Read More Below
