I started moving. My vision tunneled. The walls of the beautiful home I had built felt like they were collapsing inward. Every step I took toward that corridor felt incredibly heavy, as if gravity had multiplied.
“I… I can pack my things,” my mother wept softly. “I’ll go to a motel, Chloe. Just don’t tell David. Please, he has enough stress with the company. Don’t make him choose.”
“He wouldn’t choose you anyway!” Chloe laughed, a cruel, piercing sound that made me physically nauseous. “I’m his wife! I’m the future of this family. You are just a painful reminder of the trailer park he dragged himself out of. Put the rest of your garbage in the bag. The Uber is waiting at the service entrance. You are not walking out the front door where the neighbors can see you.”
I turned the corner and stepped into the threshold of my mother’s bedroom.
The scene before me will be permanently burned into my retinas until the day I die.
My mother, seventy-two years old, frail, with hands that had scrubbed floors so I could eat, was on her hands and knees. She was frantically stuffing her few, simple cardigans and a framed photograph of my late father into a black plastic trash bag. Her tears were falling heavily, spotting the pristine hardwood floor.
Standing over her, arms crossed, wearing a five-thousand-dollar silk loungewear set I had bought her for our anniversary, was my wife. Her face was twisted into a sneer of pure, unfiltered hatred.
I stood there in the doorway. The silence that followed was deafening.
CHAPTER 2
For a fraction of a second, the universe simply stopped.
