Margaret tried to recover the ground by sheer force of volume. “You’re vindictive, Clara. This is exactly why Ethan left. You always needed to be in charge, always had to make everyone feel small.”
I almost admired how smoothly she could step around a man marrying his mistress in Nevada and land on me as the problem.
“You know what,” I said, “you’re right about one thing. I do like being in charge of my own house.”
I looked at Ethan again. “You have one hour to load up and leave. After that, the locks get checked again and any remaining property goes to a storage unit in your name.”
They argued. Of course they argued. Margaret called me cold. Lily called me pathetic. Ethan muttered threats about lawyers he could not afford. Rebecca stood in the middle of the mess with her cheap white dress and her wilting certainty, increasingly aware that none of this looked like the clean triumphant love story she had probably pictured while sleeping with my husband in hotel rooms and office-adjacent bars.
But they packed.