When My Girlfriend Told Me That Women Leave Men Like Me, a Message in Her Phone Stunned Me Several Days Later

That evening my girlfriend put the glass on the table, rolled her eyes, and told me: “You are the type of man whom women eventually leave anyway.”

I was twenty-seven years old, and what hurt me most in her words was not the insult, but the confidence. It was as if she had already won a battle whose existence I did not even know about. Behind her, on the kitchen shelf, stood a small ivory-colored wooden box. For three years, since our first meeting, I had kept copies of all important receipts in it. That evening the lid of the box remained half open.

“Do you really think so?” I asked.

“You always take everything too seriously, don’t you?”

“And the man you have been talking to every day lately, is he a business partner?”

The smile disappeared from her face for a moment, then returned.

“You are jealous, Levan. It does not suit you at all.”

I did not argue anymore. I only smiled, took my jacket, and went toward the door. She did not know that I had already known everything for six days. More precisely, for six days I had known what was happening, and that evening I was only waiting to see how far she herself would go.

Three years ago I met Nina in the city center, at a business meeting. She had a small therapeutic cosmetics brand and spoke about the future with such energy, as if success had simply been delayed. I liked her faith. I also liked that I saw potential in her before others did.

Then I became her financial support. I signed the lease for the studio. I guaranteed her loan. For several months I paid the rent for her apartment. Every time I told myself that it was temporary and that we were building the future together.

But this year Nina often began mentioning one man. At first she called him an investor. Then she said: “We will enter the retail network.” That “we” had never included me.

On Tuesday night, while Nina was showering, her laptop remained on the kitchen counter. I went to get the charger and saw an email from an unfamiliar address. The subject line read: “When your business is finished.”

The messages contained a hotel reservation, dinners at which Nina supposedly met suppliers, and phrases that had nothing to do with business. In one of them the man wrote that he could not stop thinking about Nina. Nina’s reply was: “I need a little time to finish everything with Levan.”

I closed the laptop and sat on the back balcony for almost an hour. The sound of the shower could be heard above. I held the small wooden box in my hands, the same box in which I had kept for years the obligations she had paid and I had signed.

The next morning I called my lawyer.

“You must check everything,” I told him. “But Nina must not find out.”

“If the documents are as you say, control is still on your side.”

“No,” I whispered. “She thinks she has control.”

Six days later Nina said that cruel phrase to me. I left the house calmly. Three hours later she picked up the phone, read one message, and her face changed.

“No… this is impossible,” she said.

I was standing on the stairs. Nina did not see how I stopped at the dark doorway of the living room. Another message appeared on her phone. Nina moved her finger toward the screen, while I already knew that now she would open the folder of documents…

Nina first looked at the screen, then at the door. Her hands were trembling.

“Levan?” she called.

I entered the room.

“What happened?”

“Who sent this message?”

“You tell me.”

She put the phone on the table. Only one sentence was visible on the screen: “The signature has been canceled. The new owner has been established.”

Nina smiled at me, but the smile immediately shattered.

“Did you do this?”

“I only did what I should have done six days ago.”

“You would not dare.”

“I already dared.”

Behind her lay a folder. Black, thick, with a metal clasp. Inside were my signatures, the loan documents, the studio lease, and all the transfers that had given life to her dream.

Nina moved toward the folder.

“If you open this, you will lose everything.”

“No, Nina. You called something else losing.”

She put her hand on the clasp, but at that very moment the doorbell rang. Nina froze.

My lawyer was standing behind the door. In his hand was another document, one Nina had never expected. He raised the envelope and said:

“Ms. Nina, before you sign the new agreement, you must read this…”

The lawyer put the envelope on the table. From the outside only the seal of Nina’s company could be seen, but my signature was visible below it. Nina looked at the envelope as if something alive were hiding inside the paper.

“What does this mean?” she asked.

“Open it,” I told her.

“Are you fighting against my company?”

“I am fighting to protect my own name.”

The lawyer calmly opened the envelope and took out the first sheet.

“It says here that Levan was the real guarantor of the studio lease and the loan. It also says that all shares of the company created with his money have been temporarily transferred to independent management until the financial audit is completed.”

Nina’s face grew pale.

“This is illegal.”

“No,” the lawyer replied. “It would be illegal to use that money as if it had never existed.”

I took the second sheet. There was a complete list of the transfers. Amounts, dates, purposes. Over three years I had invested one hundred and eighty-two thousand lari in her business. During the last two months, large sums had been transferred to Nina’s own account from the man she called an “investor.”

Nina grabbed the chair.

“I was supposed to help him. You were only getting in my way.”

“You were planning to live with him and leaving my signatures as obligations.”

“I was going to leave you!”

“You could have left with the truth.”

The lawyer turned on the phone. In the recording Nina’s voice could be heard, clear and without hesitation: “When I get rid of Levan, all the debts taken in his name will still remain on him. And I will have a new partner.”

Silence fell over the room. Nina listened to her own voice and seemed to see for the first time who she would become in someone else’s eyes.

“Where did you get this?” she barely said.

“From a meeting where your new partner was telling me everything about you,” I answered. “He was frightened too. Because your plan had been hidden from him as well.”

At that moment Nina’s phone rang. The man’s name appeared on the screen. She answered.

“Where are you?” the man asked loudly. “The bank called me. They told me the money is frozen and a complaint against you is being prepared.”

Nina fixed her eyes on me.

“Levan did everything.”

“No,” the man said from the other side. “You told me everything was already yours.”

The call ended. Nina collapsed into the chair.

I thought I had already heard the hardest thing, but that same evening the lawyer called me once again.

“Levan, the main problem now is not what Nina did,” he told me. “The bank opened the old folder and found one additional document. It does not have your signature, but it says that the debt is in your name…”