For twenty years, he was my everything. We were a team, or so I thought, until the day I discovered the affair. The betrayal cut deep—he had been seeing someone else behind my back. Without hesitation, I walked away from the life we had built. Six months later, he married the woman he had cheated with, the affair partner who became his “new” wife.
I spent the next few years rebuilding. I found a man who truly loved me, we married, and I finally had the daughter I had always dreamed of. Meanwhile, my ex-boyfriend seemed to fade into a bitter memory. Occasionally, he’d send a hateful text, even accusing me of cheating on him just because I had moved on. I ignored him. I had my peace.
Then came the phone call that changed everything.
A solicitor informed me that my ex had passed away by suicide. But the shock didn’t stop there: he had left me his entire estate—an inheritance worth roughly $700,000, including his apartment. He left virtually nothing to his parents or the wife he had left me for.
I received a letter he wrote before he died, and the reasons inside were haunting. He confessed that he never stopped loving me. In his mind, I was still his “true” wife. He spoke with agonizing remorse about the baby we had lost years ago, blaming himself for that tragedy. He revealed that he had been secretly following my life from afar—he knew my husband’s name, my children’s names, and where I worked. He said he wanted to give me this money to ensure I was happy and taken care of, a final attempt at penance for the pain he caused.
But there was a darker layer to his decision. His “widow” was seven months pregnant when he died. His parents were absolutely livid, demanding I hand over every cent to this woman and her unborn child.
However, as the truth began to unravel, I realized why he might have been so cold to them. Years ago, while we were still together, my ex had a vasectomy. He never told his parents. When his new wife became pregnant, he likely realized the math didn’t add up. He knew the child wasn’t his. He had been cheated on by the very woman he cheated with.
Faced with the realization that his new life was a lie, and seeing me—the woman he actually loved—happy with a family of my own, he chose to strip his “new” family of everything and return it to me.
I am now left with a fortune I never asked for and a family that hates me. His parents want me to “do the right thing” for the widow, but knowing he felt betrayed by her just as he betrayed me, I’m at a crossroads. He wanted me to have this. He wanted this to be his final word. And now, I’m the one who has to decide if I can live with the weight of his “gift.”
