The Day I Decided to Divorce
The day I decided to file for divorce, I felt nothing toward my husband anymore.
No anger.
No heartbreak.
Just emptiness.
I only wanted to get the marriage certificate, a few property documents, and finish everything cleanly.
My husband, Marco Reyes, was away on a business trip in Davao.
The safe was inside his home office in our house in Pasig City.
I knew the code. Years ago, I had needed it to retrieve the land title.
I opened the safe.
CLANG—
A thick folder fell onto the floor.
As I bent down to pick it up, a heavy stack of envelopes slid out with it.
Something about it made my stomach tighten.
Curious—and uneasy—I opened one envelope.
I never truly believed in the phrase “your heart dropping into your stomach” until that exact moment.
Inside were hundreds of photographs.
They were carefully organized—by year, by month.
Every single photo was of me.
Sleeping.
But not in bed.
In the bathroom.
Not once.
Not twice.
Over and over again.
The angles were low.
Tilted.
Hidden.
Like someone had secretly placed a camera in a corner meant never to be seen.
My hands trembled as I flipped through the photos.
Then I reached photo number 37.
My legs gave out.
A freezing chill ran through my entire body.
In the corner of the photo, I saw a triangular crack in the bathroom tile.
That tile didn’t belong to a hotel.
It wasn’t from our house.
It belonged to my mother-in-law’s house.
The bathroom on the left side, near the kitchen.
That cracked tile—I remembered it clearly.
Because four years ago, I slipped and scraped my leg on it myself.
So then—
Why was I sleeping in the bathroom of my mother-in-law’s house?
Who carried me there?
And who took these photos?
Before I could even catch my breath, another photo slipped out of the envelope and landed face-down on the floor.
I picked it up.
On the back, written in shaky handwriting, was a single sentence:
“Twelfth time. She doesn’t remember anything.”
The photo slipped from my fingers.
My ears rang.
This wasn’t just voyeurism.
This wasn’t just perversion.
Someone had made me unconscious—again and again—and brought me into that bathroom to photograph me.
Shaking, I opened the final folder.
Inside was a single A4 paper, folded into thirds.
When I unfolded it, my knees buckled and I collapsed onto the floor.
It was a still image printed from a security camera.
A figure wearing a hood was carrying an unconscious woman—
Me.
Walking across the yard, heading toward the back entrance of my mother-in-law’s house.
At the bottom of the page was a message:
“Deliver her to you this time. Don’t let my wife find out.”
Signed with a name I knew too well.
My husband’s.