My wife severed our marriage through an email while I was serving overseas…

I got the divorce papers by email while I was still in the desert. Thirteen years of marriage ended in a PDF attachment. My name is Nathan, 42 years old, staff sergeant with the 82nd Airborne.

I’d been in Kandahar for four months when Becky decided she was done waiting. The subject line read, let’s be adults about this. The message itself was three sentences long.

She’d already filed the paperwork. She’d already emptied our joint account. She’d already moved her new boyfriend Jeremy into our house in Spokane.

I read the email twice, closed my laptop, took a shower in the communal stall, got dressed for my shift, said nothing to anyone. When I got back to my bunk that night, I replied with one word, understood. That was it, no argument, no begging, no threats.

Wilson, my bunkmate, noticed something was off. You good, man, he asked, not looking up from his book. Yeah, I said, just some stuff back home.

He nodded, and that was the end of it. Military guys know when to leave things alone. Truth is, I wasn’t surprised.

Six months before deployment, things had changed, small things. Becky stopped asking about my day, started working late at the dental office where she answered phones, started going to the gym three times a week but never seemed to break a sweat, new clothes, new friends I never met, new passwords on her phone. I didn’t confront her, didn’t start checking her messages or following her around, that’s not who I am.

But I wasn’t blind either, so I made some quiet moves of my own. Nothing dramatic, just precautions. I secured important documents in a storage unit across town, birth certificate, marriage license, house deed with only my name on it thanks to the VA loan, military benefits paperwork.

I moved my grandfather’s watch and my mom’s old silver to the same unit, things that mattered. I also opened a separate account at a different bank and started diverting part of my pay there, not enough that she’d notice but enough that I wouldn’t be starting from zero if things went south. The night before I deployed, she hugged me at the airport and said, stay safe, okay? Her eyes were dry, like she was saying goodbye to a co-worker, not a husband heading to war.

I should have known then, but part of me still hoped I was wrong. I wasn’t. What she didn’t know was that I’d prepared for this moment, and what she didn’t understand was that I never start fights.

But I do finish them. I met Becky at a friend’s barbecue in 2010. I was home between tours, staying with my buddy Jason in Spokane.

She was finishing nursing school but ended up working admin at a dental practice instead. Less stress, she said. We were married eight months later.

Becky used to say she was proud of my service, though she never quite understood it. Her dad was a bank manager, her brother a pharmacist. No military in her family.

She’d ask when I was going to get a real job, not realizing that after 15 years, the Army was my career, not just a job I was killing time at. We bought our house in 2014. Nothing fancy, but it was ours.

Three bedrooms, small yard, quiet neighborhood. My name was the only one on the mortgage since the VA loan was in my name, but I added her to the deed because that’s what married people do, share things. My dad died a year after we got married, heart attack while shoveling snow…