When my husband brought home a puppy, he said it was a lifelong dream. The problem? Our seven-year-old son is allergic. I warned him, but he insisted our boy could “just stay away.” That night, I took the puppy to my sister’s house.
The next morning, I found my son struggling to breathe. I rushed him to the ER—he was minutes from anaphylaxis. The allergist asked if he’d touched anything the dog had slept on. I realized—the couch.
When we got home, my husband brushed it off. “You’re overreacting,” he said, then asked where the dog was. When I told him, he called me “crazy” in texts to another woman. That was my breaking point.
I left with our son and stayed with my sister. He never once asked how our boy was. Two weeks later, that woman, Alina, reached out. She’d been seeing him, thinking he was divorced. She showed me screenshots where he mocked me and said he wanted someone “not obsessed with kids.”
That was all I needed. I filed for separation and started over with my son. Months later, my sister kept the puppy—and we learned it wasn’t the dog, but the old rug it had slept on that caused the reaction.
That puppy didn’t break our family—it exposed the cracks that were already there. And leaving gave us peace we never had before.
