…fight over the house.”
I stopped the video. I watched that part three more times.
“After what the doctor told me yesterday.”
What doctor? I hadn’t seen a doctor in two months. Not since my annual checkup, when they’d found a small lump during my mammogram and sent me for a biopsy. I’d been waiting for the results. I’d been told they’d call.
I called my doctor’s office from the parking garage at work. My hands were shaking so badly I dialed wrong twice.
The nurse was confused. “Mrs. Bennett, Dr. Shah called your home number yesterday afternoon with your results. Your husband answered. He said he’d have you call back. He said you were resting.”
He’d taken the call. And he hadn’t told me.
Dr. Shah got on the line a minute later. She spoke very gently. It was breast cancer. Stage one. Small. Caught early. “This is very, very treatable,” she said. “Surgery, maybe some radiation. The survival rate at this stage is excellent. I’m so sorry you’re hearing it this way.”
My husband had heard “cancer” and stopped listening. He’d heard what he wanted to hear. That I was dying. That he could move his girlfriend into my bedroom and wait.
I didn’t go home that night. I stayed with my sister. I called a divorce lawyer the next morning, and then I called Dr. Shah’s office back and scheduled my surgery.
I had the lumpectomy three weeks later. My sister held my hand in the recovery room. My husband didn’t know I’d had it until the divorce papers arrived the same week, with a copy of the security footage and a very polite letter from my lawyer explaining that hiding a spouse’s medical diagnosis in hopes of inheriting the marital home would be of great interest to a judge.
It was. The judge awarded me the house.
The girlfriend, I found out later, left him when she learned I wasn’t actually dying. She’d thought she was moving in “temporarily.”
I finished radiation in the spring. My last scan came back clean. My oncologist says my prognosis is excellent.
On the day of my last treatment, my sister threw me a party. I wore my favorite silk robe. The one the other woman had photographed herself in. I’d had it professionally cleaned twice. I thought about throwing it away. Then I decided no. It was mine. Everything in that house was mine.
I’m going to be around a very long time.
