At 65, five years after my divorce, I still had the bank card my ex-husband left me with $300. I never used it. But when I finally tried to withdraw the money, I froze in disbelief.

I am sixty-five years old, and for most of my life, I didn’t think of myself as an individual story. I thought of myself as part of a pair.
For thirty-seven years, I was Patrick Miller’s wife.

Our marriage wasn’t romantic in the way movies like to pretend. It was made of routines—morning coffee, shared bills, quiet dinners, arguments that faded into silence. It wasn’t perfect, but it was honest. I believed that whatever happened—illness, age, hardship—we would face it side by side.

I was wrong.

The end came in a family courthouse in Cleveland. No shouting. No tears. Just signatures on paper and the dry sound of pages being stamped. Decades of life reduced to a few paragraphs written in legal language.

When it was over, Patrick didn’t hesitate.

He reached into his jacket and placed a bank card in my hand. It wasn’t dramatic. It wasn’t cruel in tone. That somehow made it worse.

“There’s about three hundred dollars on it,” he said. “It should help you for now.”

That sentence hollowed me out.

Thirty-seven years of marriage—three hundred dollars.
No apology. No explanation. No goodbye.

I stood there long after he walked away, holding that card like it weighed a thousand pounds.

I never used it.

I kept it in a drawer, untouched, because swiping it felt like agreeing with him—that my life had been worth so little. After the divorce, everything fell apart quietly. I rented a narrow room behind an aging grocery store. I cleaned office buildings before dawn. Some nights I went to bed hungry. Pain became a constant companion. Pride was the only thing I still owned.

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