My Ex's "C" Was Never Me

“Another wire transfer pinged. It was another "apology payment" from Victoria Sterling, my girlfriend of five years. This one was different: $500,000. Far more than her usual fifty thousand, a sum that had already made me secretly rich. I' d played the role of the devoted, slightly naive boyfriend perfectly for too long. But this unprecedented amount felt less like an apology and more like a severance. Then, a video message arrived from Dylan Price, from Vicky' s social circle. It showed Vicky at a party, her arms wrapped around a young man, kissing him deeply. He looked unsettlingly like me, a younger, perhaps less worn version. Dylan' s text followed: "That' s Caleb Vance. Her childhood flame. Guess who\'s back?" Suddenly, Vicky' s pet name, "My C," and her online handles like "ForeverC," made a sickening kind of sense. I was never "C" for Ethan. I was a stand-in. A sharp pang of genuine hurt hit my chest. I remembered being a scholarship kid from Appalachia, chasing her, believing she saw something in me. Her friends had called me a "charity case." I later found her hidden love letters to Caleb, recently signed, calling me "just a boy, a distraction." When I finally confronted her during our breakup, she exploded. "You don\'t break up with me, Ethan. I decide when this is over! You belong to me!" I was shocked by the raw possessiveness in her voice. Her absolute conviction that she owned me, body and soul. She saw me as nothing more than an expensive pet, a compliant placeholder. How could I have been so blind, so foolishly naive for five years? But that immediate hurt quickly turned cold, pragmatic. If I was a substitute, I was a well-paid one. That $500,000 wasn't severance; it was a bonus for a long-term performance. With millions now in my accounts, I was financially independent. It was time to leave Vicky and her gilded cage behind.”