I booked a private island to save my marriage, but he showed up with his mother and his ex: “You’ll cook while we enjoy ourselves”… so I canceled everything in front of them.
“You’ll take care of cooking and cleaning while we enjoy the beach, Lydia, because that’s precisely what a wife is for.”
The phrase came out of my husband’s mouth right there, on the private dock in the Florida Keys, spoken openly in front of his parents, his ex-girlfriend, and the pilot who was waiting to take us to the private island he had booked for our anniversary.
I stood completely still, clutching my sunglasses with a trembling hand, my heart pounding against my ribs as if it were about to burst out of my chest.
She had been married to Caleb Harrison for five long years, five years during which she flaunted designer watches, extravagant dinners in the port district, tailored suits and classic sports cars, while everyone believed she was a powerful figure in the business world.
The truth was far less impressive, because the cybersecurity company that funded his entire lifestyle actually belonged to me, a business I had built from a small studio in the West End while surviving on barely three hours of sleep each night.
I turned down all party invitations and endured years of mounting debt and ridicule until I finally turned that small startup into a multi-million dollar corporation.
Caleb worked as a mid-level manager at a logistics company, and his modest salary didn’t even cover the insurance for the car he drove daily.
Although his indifference towards me was growing, I still desperately believed that I could save our failing marriage if I tried hard enough.
That was the sole reason I booked a week on a private Caribbean island for our fifth anniversary, securing a villa with a personal chef, full staff, and private beach for one hundred and fifty thousand dollars.
I did it because Caleb had been telling me for months that I was cold and that my company had turned me into a woman who no longer had a home in her heart.
He said he needed a more present and traditional wife, and I was naive enough to believe that he really missed me.
The night before the trip, I handed him the itinerary inside a thick black envelope with embossed gold lettering.
“This trip is just for the two of us, Caleb, no meetings, no business calls, and absolutely no outside distractions,” I said quietly.
