I stood there, staring at the dates, doing the agonizing math in my head. Seven years. Eighty-four months. $1,400 a month. That was $117,600. A deep, boiling rage began to mix with my crushing sorrow.

For the last few years, we had been living on a strict budget.

We skipped vacations, drove older cars, and ate at home because he insisted we needed to aggressively fund our joint retirement accounts. He managed our finances entirely. He had told me the market was down, that our accounts had taken a hit, and that we needed to tighten our belts for our future.

He hadn’t lost our retirement in the market. He had funneled $117,600 of our life savings into this house to play house with another woman and children that weren’t mine. My legs were trembling, but I forced myself to walk down the hallway. I pushed open the door to the master bedroom.

The room was bathed in morning light, a king-sized bed perfectly made. The closet door was ajar, revealing his recognizable dress shirts pressed and hung neatly next to a row of elegant women’s dresses. I walked over to the nightstand, and that is when my legs finally buckled beneath me.

Sitting perfectly framed in silver was a photograph. It was my husband, looking deeply tanned and impossibly happy, wearing mouse ears. He had one arm wrapped tightly around a beautiful, petite brunette woman, and his other arm holding a little girl, while a toddler boy sat on his shoulders.

The background was clearly Disney World. I recognized the shirt he was wearing. I bought it for him. I packed that very shirt in his suitcase last July. Last July, when he kissed me goodbye at the airport, claiming he was flying to a week-long tech conference in Orlando.

He had called me every night from his “hotel room,” complaining about the boring seminars and how much he missed me. He told me he couldn’t wait to come home to me. The entire time, he was riding roller coasters and eating cotton candy with his secret family.

I slid down the wall, collapsing onto the plush carpet of a stranger’s bedroom. I sat there in the silence, crying until my throat was raw, mourning a nine-year marriage that turned out to be nothing but smoke and mirrors. I don’t know how long I sat there, but eventually, the sheer, blinding anger gave me the strength to stand back up.

I needed to see all of it. I needed to witness the full extent of the lie before I burned his life to the ground. I walked across the hall and pushed open the door to the little girl’s bedroom. It was painted a soft pink, filled with stuffed animals and storybooks.

It broke my heart in a totally different way to know these children were innocent victims of his monstrous deception, too.