It was gambling. Every cent of it.
Every transfer I’d sent him — every fifteenth of the month, a whole year of it — left his card within the hour. Not for rent. Not for a single pharmacy. It went to the same handful of names over and over, those cheerful little logos stitched out of letters and numbers that mean nothing until you search one and your stomach drops. Online casinos. Slot apps. A betting site that took deposits at 4 a.m. and paid out in promises. The clicking keyboard in the spare room had never once been résumés. It was reels spinning in the dark while I slept for the early shift — my grocery money, my overtime, his medication money, all of it fed into a screen that gave nothing back.
I scrolled until my thumb went numb. Deposit. Deposit. Deposit. A few small wins he’d chased straight back in within minutes. Thousands gone — more than thousands — the kind of number that makes your ears ring. While I’d been clipping coupons and telling myself “he’s just having a hard year,” he’d been emptying every hryvnia I earned into a machine, then turning to me on the fifteenth with that same tired look and a flat “thanks, love.”
And the worst of it: he’d built the whole thing on my kindness. “Don’t make me beg.” “Don’t press on the bruise.” Every soft thing I’d done to protect his pride had been the exact cover he needed to keep the tap running.
I sat on the bathroom floor with his phone glowing in my hand and did the math I’d refused to do for twelve months. I didn’t wake him. I didn’t scream. I took screenshots of all of it — every spin, every 4 a.m. deposit, the entire year laid out in cold little rows — and I started a new folder on my own phone, the one he’d never thought to ask the password to.
Then I began to plan the morning he’d wake up and find out his “charity case” had been keeping receipts.
