His Wife Took His Card and Gave Him Just 20 DLR … Until He Opened Her Secret Envelope

—It’s our land.

He did not answer.

Not because she didn’t want to, but because she suddenly couldn’t find her voice.

Maribel took another sheet of paper out of the envelope.

It was a simple plan.

A small house with 2 bedrooms, living room, kitchen, bathroom, service patio and a small garden in front.

In one corner, with a blue pen, someone had written:

“Space for bougainvillea.”

Martin swallowed hard.

When they were dating, he always said that one day he would have a house with a bougainvillea at the entrance, like his grandmother’s in Oaxaca.

I was just joking.

She said that when they didn’t even have enough to pay the full rent for the room where they lived.

Maribel never made fun of that dream.
She just kept it to herself.

“Ernesto isn’t some man in hiding,” she said, her voice trembling. “He owns the land. We’ll finish paying him tomorrow.”

Martin looked up.

The rage slowly fell from his face, like old paint in the rain.

—Are we finished?

-Yeah.

She opened the graph paper notebook she always kept on the table.

Martin had hated her for years.

It seemed to him a symbol of his humiliation.

There were all the receipts, accounts, and savings.

Each page contained dates, amounts, payments, credits, and small notes.

“Subtract 100 from the chicken.”
“Do not buy a blouse.”
“Save Martín’s overtime.”
“Mrs. Lety’s sewing: 250.”
“Ernesto’s payment: 1,800.”
“23,400 is missing.”
“12,000 is missing.”
“3,500 is missing.”

The last line read:

“Final payment: tomorrow.”

Martin felt his legs go weak.

He sat down in the nearest chair.

Maribel remained standing, her red dress worn and her eyes filled with a sadness that he had never stopped to look at.

“Five years ago, I saw that lot advertised on a piece of cardboard stuck outside a store,” he explained. “It was far away, yes. It wasn’t a fancy area. But it cost the only thing we could try to afford.”

Martin covered his mouth.

—Why didn’t you ever tell me?

Maribel let out a broken laugh.

—Because every time we talked about money, we ended up fighting. You’d come home tired, and rightly so. I was tired too. And if I told you, you’d want to use that money to relax a little, to treat yourself, so you wouldn’t feel inferior to your friends.

He lowered his head.