“I’m Leaving You for a Rich Woman, So You Can Sit Here in Poverty!” My Husband Declared, Unaware That His New Girlfriend Lived in an Apartment I Rented Out
Igor dropped his fork. It clattered against the plate, leaving a greasy streak of sauce on the white porcelain.
He did not even notice. His eyes were fixed on his phone screen, and a strange, distant smile had frozen on his lips.
“Something interesting?” I asked, trying to make my voice sound as casual as possible.
“Huh? No, it’s just work,” he said, reluctantly putting his phone aside. “These reports and figures again… I’m so tired of all of it.”
He sighed so heavily that anyone might have thought he was carrying the weight of the entire world on his shoulders. I looked at him and thought about how much he had changed over the past year. Our year.
When we got married, he had been different. Or perhaps I had simply wanted to see him that way.
He had spoken about love and said that he did not care who I was or how much money I earned.
And I, supposedly an ordinary accountant at a tiny company called Horns and Hooves, believed him. I desperately wanted to believe him. “Can you imagine? The wife of our commercial director, Vitka, bought herself a new car,” Igor said, poking disdainfully at the cold chicken on his plate. “Just like that. She felt like it. When was the last time you and I went to the seaside?”
I remained silent. The question was not meant to be answered. It was a criticism aimed at me. At us.
At our small, cozy apartment on the outskirts of the city, which he called a “birdhouse.”
Lately, conversations like this had become normal for us. He spoke about money more and more often.
Other people’s money. The beautiful life that was happening somewhere beyond the windows of our “birdhouse,” a life that had nothing to do with us.
“I met some very interesting people today,” he suddenly said, becoming animated. His eyes lit up with the same fire I had once mistaken for love. “Serious investors. They have incredible projects and opportunities!”
He spoke for a long time and with great enthusiasm. He talked about one of them in particular.
Karina.
Smart, ambitious, and successful. She lived alone and had achieved everything by herself.
“She has an apartment in the city center. Can you imagine? Panoramic windows with a view of the entire city. Designer renovations, furniture from Italy…” He rolled his eyes as though savoring every word.
I listened to him, and something inside me slowly began to freeze, turning into ice.
He described the apartment in the Aquamarine residential complex with such admiration that I recognized it immediately. Of course I did.
After all, I was the one renting that apartment to Karina.
“Something like that is as far beyond our reach as the moon,” he concluded bitterly, looking around our kitchen. “Sometimes I feel as though I’m drowning in all this… simplicity. In this hopelessness.”
He looked at me. There was no warmth in his gaze.
There was only a cold, calculating assessment, as though he were estimating my value. And he clearly did not like the result.
“Is this really all there is?” he asked quietly, almost in a whisper, staring somewhere beyond me. “Is this really our life?”
The experiment I had begun a year earlier had failed spectacularly.
My naive idea of being loved for myself rather than for my father’s millions had shattered against ordinary human greed.
Igor was not the person he had pretended to be. Or, even worse, he had always been exactly this person, and I had simply failed to notice.
He began coming home later and later.
He smelled of someone else’s expensive perfume. I recognized the fragrance. I remembered it.
He brought coldness and distance home with him.
Our “birdhouse” now seemed to disgust him physically.
“Can’t we buy a proper coffee machine?” he complained one morning, staring at our old drip coffee maker.
“Karina’s machine grinds the beans by itself and makes ten different types of coffee. We were discussing business at her place.”
“This one makes coffee too,” I replied calmly, feeling everything tighten inside me.
I could have bought an entire coffee shop. A whole chain of coffee shops. But I continued playing my role.
“That thing doesn’t make coffee. It makes brown sludge,” he snapped.
Karina became the standard by which everything was measured.
Karina wore designer clothes.
Karina ate dinner at Michelin-starred restaurants.
Karina drove the latest Audi.
Karina, Karina, Karina…
He spoke about her as though she were a goddess who had descended to earth to show a miserable man like him what true success looked like.
One evening, I heard him speaking on the phone in another room. He was laughing—carelessly and happily, in a way I had not heard him laugh for a long time.
“No, of course she doesn’t know anything,” he said, lowering his voice. “She’s too… simple for that. Do you understand? She has no imagination and no ambition. All you can do with her is vegetate.”
I stood behind the door, feeling the floor disappear beneath my feet.
Simple.
That word hurt more than a direct insult.
My entire performance, all my attempts to build an honest relationship, had been erased by that single word.
I decided it was time to end the show.
That evening, when he returned home, I was waiting for him in the kitchen. He walked in without looking at me and tossed his jacket over a chair.
“We need to talk, Igor.”
“About what?” He opened the refrigerator, looked inside, and slammed the door shut in disgust. “About how we don’t have any money again? I’m tired of it.”
“I want you to leave.”
He slowly turned toward me. His expression was not one of surprise but of relief, as though I had spared him the unpleasant task of beginning the conversation himself.
“Are you serious?” He smirked. “You’re throwing me out? Out of this dump?”
He swept his hand around our small kitchen. His eyes settled on me, filled with contempt and poorly concealed triumph.
“I was planning to leave anyway!” His voice grew louder. “Do you think I want to spend the rest of my life here, counting every penny?”
“I met a woman who appreciates me! A woman who can give me everything I’ve ever dreamed of! I’m leaving you for a rich woman, so you can sit here in poverty!”
He spat out the words with such malice and enjoyment that it seemed as though he were taking revenge on me for every failure in his life.
He stood in the doorway, handsome, smug, and completely certain that he was right.
He still did not know that his new, wealthy life would take place inside my apartment.
And according to my rules.
I gave him two hours to pack his belongings. Then I simply changed my clothes.
I took off my “ordinary accountant” work suit, put on a cashmere dress, and ordered a business-class taxi.
Forty minutes later, I arrived at the Aquamarine residential complex.
I did not ring the intercom. I opened the entrance door with my key and went up to the correct floor. Music and laughter could be heard from behind the apartment door.
Their laughter.
Once again, I used my own key. The door opened silently.
They were standing beside the panoramic window, holding glasses of champagne. Igor had his arm around Karina’s waist and was whispering something into her ear. She threw her head back and laughed.
“I hope I’m not interrupting,” I said, closing the door behind me.
The music stopped. They both spun around.
Confusion appeared on Igor’s face first. Then it turned into anger.
“You? What are you doing here? How did you get inside?” He took a step toward me.
“I have keys,” I replied calmly, placing my handbag on the designer console table in the hallway. “To all my apartments.”
Karina looked from me to Igor. The glass in her hand trembled.
“What does this mean, Igor?” she asked in an icy voice.
“This… this is my wife,” he forced out. “My ex-wife.”
“Not quite,” I corrected him. “Technically, I’m still your current wife. But that’s only a formality. That isn’t the important part. The important part is the apartment. Beautiful, isn’t it?”
I looked around the living room.
Igor stood frozen like a statue. It seemed that he was finally beginning to understand.
“What nonsense are you talking about? This is Karina’s apartment,” he hissed.
“You’re mistaken. This is my apartment, which I rent to your Karina.” I turned toward her. “By the way, Karina, your utility payment for last month is overdue.”
“But that no longer matters. According to the rental agreement, I have the right to terminate it unilaterally if the tenant violates the rules of residence.”
“Living here with unauthorized men—especially married ones—is specifically mentioned in those rules. You have twenty-four hours to move out.”
Karina’s face became as white as the wall behind her. She looked at Igor with such hatred that he took a step backward.
“You… You lied to me?” she whispered.
But Igor was looking only at me. There was terror in his eyes. His entire world, built upon dreams of someone else’s wealth, had collapsed in a single moment.
His smug grin disappeared, leaving behind a confused and pathetic expression.
“Wait… How? You’re just… an accountant.”
“I own the company where I’m officially employed as an accountant,” I said with a shrug. “I wanted to know whether you could love me instead of my money.”
“The experiment failed. But I’m not offended. Everyone chooses what they are capable of handling. You chose a beautiful display window.”
I turned and walked toward the exit.
“But what about… me?” I heard his broken voice behind me.
I stopped in the doorway without turning around.
“You can sit in poverty, just as you wanted. Only now it will be real.”
I walked out and closed the door behind me.
I felt neither triumph nor malicious satisfaction.
Only a slight weariness and a strange, crystal-clear understanding: you cannot force someone to see gold when their eyes have been blinded by the sparkle of tinsel.
The first call came three days later. I did not answer.
Then the messages began pouring in.
Dozens of messages in which pleas for forgiveness were mixed with accusations and threats.
He wrote that I had ruined his life. He claimed that he had loved me and that I had deceived him.
I read everything with cold calmness and blocked his number. But he kept finding new ones.
A week later, he waited for me outside my office.
He looked disheveled. His expensive clothes hung awkwardly on his now-gaunt body. Desperation filled his eyes.
“Anya, we need to talk!” He grabbed my arm.
“We have nothing to talk about, Igor,” I said, gently freeing myself from his grip. “I’ve filed for divorce. The documents will be mailed to you.”
“I won’t give you a divorce!” he shouted. “I love you! I was an idiot! I understand everything now!”
“Karina… She simply turned my head! But I was thinking only about you and our future!”
“Our future?” I gave a bitter laugh. “You were thinking about your future.”
“A future in which I was nothing more than an irritating obstacle until a more profitable match appeared.”
“Then it turned out that the most profitable match had been beside you all along. The problem, Igor, is that I am not a match to be evaluated. And I’m not a winning lottery ticket.”
He looked at me without understanding.
He still believed that the problem was Karina and the affair. He did not understand that the problem was him. His true nature.
“I’ll fix everything!” He stepped closer. “I’ll prove it to you! Tell me what I need to do!”
At that moment, I realized that I was finally free.
Not merely free from him, but free from the naive girl I had been a year earlier.
I no longer searched for proof of love. I simply knew what love was supposed to be.
And what it was not.
“Nothing,” I replied. “There’s nothing you can do, because you can’t repair something that never existed. The most important thing was missing between us—respect.”
“You didn’t respect me. You despised my ‘simple’ life, my job, and our home. And when someone despises you, they cannot love you.”
I walked around him and headed toward my car. He shouted something after me, but I was no longer listening.
The divorce was finalized a month later.
I sold the apartment in Aquamarine, along with our former “birdhouse.”
I bought myself a small house outside the city and arranged to manage my company remotely.
Sometimes I think about him.
Not with anger or pity, but with a detached kind of curiosity, as though he were a character in a book I had finished reading.
He received exactly what he had desired so passionately—a lesson.
A cruel but fair lesson.
A lesson that chasing the sparkle of tinsel always ends in darkness.
And that true wealth is not what you possess, but who you are when all those possessions are gone.