My Billionaire Husband believed in His Marriage Coach, until He Lost Me

When I got married to Duncan, he said his only requirement for me was that I spend all fifty million in one year, without a single cent left over. Because I'd gone through too many poor days with him,we'd lived in a cramped basement and survived on tap water,and in our poorest year, I paid for my own abortion with the money I made delivering food. After Duncan made it big, he often felt he owed me. He kept trying to break me of my habit of pinching every penny. Until Narelle, his childhood sweetheart and self-proclaimed marriage coach, returned from abroad. Narelle said we weren't equal, and gave our marriage a zero. She told Duncan: love can't be sustained by money. So Duncan froze my black card. He canceled the honeymoon trip I'd been counting down to for months. He even canceled the money he'd prepaid at the hospital for my prenatal checkups. He said he didn't want me to get into the habit of constantly asking him for things. Despite being pregnant, I had no choice but to dig out that five-year-old second-hand electric scooter and earn my own money. I never expected to wipe out in the rain. The doctor said I needed to stay in the hospital to protect the pregnancy and kept urging me to pay the medical fees, so I had no choice but to call Duncan. He rushed over and pulled me into his arms, his face full of worry. But Narelle, standing nearby with her notebook open, reminded him: "Duncan, don't give in just because Winona is acting pitiful. Love needs to be fair. I suggest you only pay half the fee." Hearing that, Duncan immediately let go of me and said with a helpless sigh: "Winona, did you hear that? No amount of acting cute or playing the victim is going to work today. You'll have to cover the other half yourself." After they left, I saw on Narelle's social media that Duncan had just bid on a pink diamond worth tens of millions of dollars for her. It was the gift he'd originally bought for me. I wiped my tears and quietly did the math. The half Duncan paid. Just enough to cover an abortion. ...... The abortion was scheduled for tomorrow afternoon. After confirming it, I rode that electric scooter home again. It was only when I pushed the door open that I noticed a pair of delicate heels by the entrance. Narelle, draped in a bathrobe, was lounging at our dining table. Seeing me come back, she moved her pen, muttering as she wrote: "Winona didn't do any housework today and didn't earn a dime. Her economic value, labor value, and emotional value are all zero." Duncan, carrying dishes out of the kitchen, explained in a low voice: "To better work through our marriage problems, Narelle's going to stay at our place for now." "The things she's pointing out about you—you need to remember to change them." I opened my mouth to refuse, but he cut me off. "Enough, Come eat first. We'll talk after dinner." Duncan pulled me to the table, leaving no room for argument. I sat down in silence. In front of Narelle were foie gras and steak. But Duncan pushed a plate of shredded potatoes in front of me and said, "I made this especially for you." I didn't touch my chopsticks. Narelle wore a look that said she'd expected exactly that. She shrugged and said: "See? She's already used to measuring your relationship by money." "The potato dish is cheap, so she looks down on it—but she forgets that you made it yourself." "I told you long ago, all that frugality she used to put on was just fear that you'd throw her away once you got rich." "She was just investing early so she'd have something to fall back on. Now that she's got what she wanted, she's forgotten where she came from." Duncan's face went cold. "Narelle was right after all. You've really become materialistic." He'd forgotten that once, in that cramped basement, we always bought one dollar's worth of potatoes and stir-fried a big plate of shredded potatoes. Once, I bought a batch that had gone bad because they were cheaper. I ate them and spent the whole night vomiting. After that, the sight of shredded potatoes was enough to make my stomach turn. After Duncan's fortune grew into the hundreds of millions, he never let that dish touch our table again. Every meal, he had the chef prepare eight elaborate dishes. Japanese cuisine, Cantonese cuisine, French cuisine—never the same twice. I used to complain that it was wasteful and tell him to cut back. But he ruffled my hair and said: "The only reason I make money is to spend it on my wife. So you need to get rid of that penny-pinching habit of yours." But now, just because I don't eat shredded potatoes, I've been labeled as materialistic based on a single sentence from Narelle. This Duncan no longer felt like the man I knew. "Don't forget to pay your share of the bill." Narelle finished her last bite of foie gras and reminded me. "Three thousand four hundred and five." Duncan looked at his phone and sent me the bill. "How much?" I was stunned. "Caviar and foie gras, thirteen hundred; steak, twenty-one hundred; potatoes, five. No problem." Narelle confirmed. "I didn't eat a single bite of the caviar or the steak..." "That's enough." Duncan frowned and cut me off impatiently. "Why do you have to split hairs over every little thing with Narelle? She's a guest." Narelle sighed. "Never mind. This one's on me, sweetie." "But remember, people shouldn't be too greedy—don't actually treat Duncan like a sucker." With that, she sent Duncan the money. It was returned almost instantly. Duncan smiled helplessly. "Come on, Narelle. If I took money from you over a meal like this, what kind of man would I be?" Narelle didn't press it, and reminded me again: "Oh, and one more thing—since Duncan cooked, you can wash the dishes." I looked at my hands. I'd fallen hard this morning. Both palms had been scraped raw and were still wrapped in bandages. But there was no pity in Duncan's eyes. He just said flatly, "It's not that serious. Don't make such a big deal out of it." "Go wash them. That's only fair." I couldn't help letting out a quiet laugh. Fair? Those years Duncan spent building his business from the ground up, I worried about him constantly and never once let him lift a finger around the house. And I never spent a cent of his money. I'd given him everything I had. And this was what I got in return. The dishes and chopsticks were left sitting in the kitchen. I didn't touch them. I turned and walked straight back to our bedroom.

The next morning, I decided to tell Duncan formally. I was giving up this baby and divorcing him. "Duncan, I want to talk to you about the baby." Instead, Duncan crossed his arms and let out a cold laugh. "Narelle was right. The second I took away your black card, you'd use the baby to threaten me." Narelle shook her head and sighed. "Because she knows that apart from her ability to give birth, she has nothing to offer you." "Think carefully before you use the child to threaten Duncan ,plenty of women would love to give Duncan a child. If you won't, there's no shortage of others who will." I looked at Duncan's utterly indifferent face. I demanded, "Duncan, is that what you think too? Have you forgotten how much I went through for this baby?" Five years ago, the cheap abortion pills I bought online had nearly ruined my health. During my recovery I still went out delivering food in the rain every day. It made getting pregnant again incredibly difficult. For this baby. I went through box after box of fertility injections. The day we found out I was pregnant, Duncan held me and cried like a child. In the middle of the night he'd take out the ultrasound report and look at it again and again. His eyes flickered, and for a moment, it looked as if he wanted to say something. But Narelle cut in, her expression disapproving. "It's because you're in poor health. You shouldn't make Duncan pay for what your own body went through.” "Since we're on the subject, let's settle it properly." "Duncan, I'll send her a bill on your behalf." I checked my phone. The pending charges were listed one by one: More than a hundred fertility injections. More than sixty rounds of herbal medicine I'd taken to regulate my body. Everything I had once done for this baby. All of it had been reduced to a cold, emotionless bill: twenty-seven thousand. I stared at him blankly, the disappointment spreading through me like ice. "Duncan, you forgot, you cut off my card. I don't have that kind of money right now." Narelle just scoffed. "No money? Don't act like you don't have any. You've been married to Duncan this long, you must have saved plenty for yourself. Who's going to believe you don't have a secret stash?" Duncan pinched the bridge of his nose. "Narelle's right. Money is all you think about now. You'll even lie about something like this." "I've given you so much, and now you won't pay half of a twenty-thousand-dollar bill." I was about to argue back. My phone rang. It was my mom. "Winona, Mom fainted last week. The doctor says I need heart surgery..." I accidentally hit speakerphone. Duncan froze for a moment, looking a little tense. "Mom's sick?" But Narelle suddenly burst out laughing, laughing so hard she could barely catch her breath. "Oh my, Duncan, how can you be so easy to fool?" "You cut off her card, so of course she has to come up with another way to get money from you." "A sick mom is a gold-digger staple. Next step, she asks you to lend her money!" The next second. Mom said, timidly, "It costs eighty thousand. Mom's managed to scrape together fifty thousand. Could you lend Mom thirty thousand...?" Duncan's face turned cold instantly. "Winona, if you're using Mom to trick me, I won't give you a single cent." But thirty thousand wasn't even enough for him to order a bottle of wine. Mom, on the other end, seemed to hear, and said in a flustered voice, "Winona, what's wrong? It's fine. Mom doesn't have to have the surgery. You two are a young couple, and there are so many things you need to spend money on." "Whatever you do, don't fight with Duncan over me, okay?" Because she knew how poor Duncan and I used to be. For the first three months of our marriage, every time I tried to spend money on my parents, they refused every single time. They didn't grasp that Duncan was already worth hundreds of millions. They just didn't want to be a burden to us. This was the first time Mom had ever asked for money. A sharp pain stabbed through my heart, and I said quickly, "Mom! What are you talking about! You can't skip the surgery just to save money!" "I'll transfer you the rest." After I hung up. I finally couldn't hold it in, and a sob tore out of me. "Duncan, when you were at your lowest, my mom lent you money, knitted you sweaters, loved you like her own son. How could you say something like that?" Seeing me like this. Duncan reached out and gently wiped the tears from my face, his voice finally softening. "All right, Winona, stop crying. You're pregnant." "It's just a few tens of thousands. As long as you don't lie to me and keep being my obedient wife, I'll give you an allowance." But Narelle shook her head to stop him. She held up her notebook and read aloud from the notes she'd already written. "Winona is exploiting your sympathy, getting her way through deception." "Uses tears and emotional blackmail at the slightest excuse. Credibility score: zero." "My advice is not to encourage this behavior. Deception should be punished.” Duncan looked at the notebook, its pages filled with one zero after another. His eyes slowly hardened again. "Winona, when did you get so scheming?" All at once I no longer had the slightest desire to explain myself. I nodded wearily. Then I took a taxi to the hospital alone, and had the abortion.

When I got home, a dull pain throbbed in my lower abdomen. But then I thought of how my mother urgently needed the money for her surgery. I gritted my teeth through the pain and pulled every piece of jewelry and luxury item from my closet. I took them to the biggest secondhand luxury shop in the city. Luckily, before Narelle returned, Duncan had still been very generous with me. There should be more than enough to pay for Mom's surgery. But after the clerk looked them over, she rolled her eyes and let out an exaggerated laugh. "Don't waste our time. All of these are fake." "And not even convincing fakes. They're so cheap and obvious, they wouldn't pass for decent knockoffs." My mind went completely blank. How could that be? The other clerks were whispering among themselves too. Every look they gave me was laced with ridicule. "So you really are here." A voice came from the doorway. I turned around. Standing at the entrance were Duncan and Narelle. Duncan's eyes were full of disappointment and disbelief. "Every gift has a special meaning, and now you want to sell them all." "If it weren't for Narelle, I never would have imagined you could stoop to something like this." A mocking glint flashed in Narelle's eyes. "I told you, she doesn't care at all about the gifts you give her—all she cares about is money." "If I had switched them out beforehand, the presents you picked out so carefully would already have been sold." "Now you've lost the bet." "So, as we agreed, all these gifts that belong to your wife are mine now. At least I won't turn around and sell them for cash." She had my luxury handbag slung over her shoulder, and the necklace around her neck was another gift Duncan had once given me. I could let all those things go. But when I saw the bracelet on her wrist, my eyes burned with tears. "Narelle, give me back my bracelet." That one wasn't bought by Duncan. It was left to me by my late grandmother—something I'd owned long before I married Duncan. Even in the hardest times, I never once thought about selling it. "Yours? Tell me, what exactly do you have that doesn't belong to Duncan?" She slid the bracelet off slowly and dangling it in front of me, swinging it back and forth like she was teasing a dog with a toy. "Take off all the clothes Duncan bought you and give them back to him, and I'll give you this junk bracelet." With everyone watching, I froze. Duncan said flatly, "Enough. She's only teasing you." But he didn't deny it, and he didn't speak up for me either. I looked at Duncan in disbelief. He knew perfectly well where that bracelet came from. The whispers around us grew louder. One person after another pulled out their phones. Every last bit of my patience was gone. I lunged and grabbed Narelle's wrist, trying to snatch back the bracelet. But Duncan moved faster, stepping between us and shoving me away with all his strength. I fell to the ground. The glass counter wobbled, then crashed down on me. In an instant, the dull ache in my lower abdomen turned into a searing pain, and blood ran down my forehead. Duncan finally panicked and reached down to pull me up. "Winona, are you okay? Is the baby all right?" Only now did he remember the baby. But he didn't know that the baby was already gone. I But he didn't know that the baby was already gone. "Let's get a divorce." Duncan's face stiffened, his eyes darkening. "Are you threatening me with a divorce?" "Narelle, you were right again." Narelle gently patted his arm, her face full of certainty. "Don't worry. She's only saying divorce because she wants you to panic. It's just a bluff." "For now, just leave her alone and let her cool off." "Come on, let's go back and get our luggage and start our Maldives trip." The honeymoon Duncan had canceled on me was supposed to be in the Maldives. After they left, I limped home. I had a lawyer help me draw up a divorce agreement. I wanted nothing that wasn't mine. But whatever was rightfully mine, I would take back. Every last bit of it.

The day of my mother's surgery was getting closer by the hour. I gritted my teeth and took a job as a server at a high-end club. After days of exhausting shifts, I finally scraped together the thirty thousand dollars we needed. I had just gotten to the hospital when my phone started buzzing like mad. It turned out Narelle had posted a video of me working at the club online. "Let's talk about just how shameless a gold-digger can get." "She's married to a billionaire CEO and still isn't satisfied." "The moment he cut off her card, she started claiming her mother was sick just to squeeze more money out of him." "And she even took the opportunity to work at a high-end club, already looking for her next rich man." "Contact us to book a consultation. Narelle will teach you how to spot gold-diggers, protect your money, and stay away from women like her." That wasn't all. That secondhand luxury store uploaded a video as well. "This woman came to my store to resell secondhand goods, and her husband caught her in the act." "She damaged our glass display counter, leaving fifty thousand in damages, and she still hasn't paid." The comments came pouring in, one judgment after another. Saying I was a gold-digger who'd married up, mocking my ugly face, telling me to pay back my debt. I stood outside my mother's hospital room, my hands and feet numb with cold. "Duncan, we came up from nothing together. Why won't you help me fight back?" Duncan spoke calmly. "They're just comments online. You don't need to take them so seriously." "You threatened me with divorce, then actually went and got yourself a job at a club. Shouldn't I let you learn a lesson from this?” "Don't worry, as long as you behave, I won't abandon you." "Be a good girl and write a ten-thousand-word apology letter and post it. Once you're home, I'll transfer you one hundred thousand dollars for pocket money." The call cut off. A sharp crash came from inside the ward. My heart jumped into my throat. "Mom, what's wrong?" I pushed the door open. Mom's phone was on the floor. On the screen was the video Narelle had posted, tearing me apart online. My face was clear as day in it. "Winona, why are they all saying such horrible things about you?" Mom said, crying. "Where's Duncan? He's been so good to you—why isn't he helping you?" "Just a few days ago he even mailed me cordyceps to help me regain my strength." "No, I'm going to call and ask him." I tried to stop her, but I was too late. The call connected, and Narelle's mocking voice came through. "Coming to beg for money? Didn't you say you had heart problems? How are you still alive?" "Married barely three months, and you two, mother and daughter, couldn't even wait three months before showing your true colors and trying to bleed him dry?" "Who are you? Why are you with my son-in-law!" My mother's voice was shaking: "How dare you say such things about my Winona!" Narelle snorted contemptuously. "Who am I? With your son-in-law at this hour—what do you think?" "Ma'am, I suggest you teach your daughter how to be a proper wife." "Instead of turning her into a shameless woman who only knows how to chase money!" I quickly ended the call. "Mom, don't listen to her!" But the next second, my mom's chest began heaving violently. The monitor screamed with a piercing alarm and her grip on my hand suddenly loosened. She was rushed into the emergency room. I don't know how long I stood there before the doors finally opened. The doctor came out and shook his head. "Her emotions fluctuated too violently in such a short time." I collapsed to the floor, every ounce of strength draining from my body. Seven days later, my mother's funeral ended. I saw that Narelle had started a livestream, taking advantage of the attention she'd stirred up. The Maldives sand was pure white, the water crystal clear. She asked with a smile: "Mr. Henson, what score would you give me for this marriage coaching?" Duncan stood at her side. He answered with a gentle smile. "Full marks. You made me see what marriage is really about, and see my wife for who she really is." "Under your guidance, she's learned to behave. She hasn't made a fuss in a whole week." "She even transferred back every cent of the allowance I'd sent her." Numb, I closed the livestream. I posted every memory Duncan and I had shared in that cramped basement, one after another, all on social media Along with my mother's death certificate and the recording of my phone call with Narelle. I picked up my suitcase, and flew to Crestwood, two thousand kilometers away. The livestream was still going. A comment asked: "But wouldn't his wife be disappointed by this and actually divorce him?" Duncan froze for a moment, but Narelle didn't hesitate at all: "Impossible. She'll handwrite that ten-thousand-word apology this week and post it publicly." "Don't believe me? Just wait and see!" "She used her own mother's illness to deceive people. An apology is the least she owes everyone." Suddenly, someone in the livestream said: "Mr. Henson's wife just posted on social media—go look, quick!"