The guest-room door was open, but a shoebox I’d seen beside Elora’s bed was gone. For four weeks, my injured ex-MIL had tracked my schedule and panicked whenever I came home early. Hours after she moved out, my neighbor returned the box and swore Elora had planned her stay before she ever called me.
“Will you be home late tomorrow?” Elora asked.
She was sitting at my kitchen table with her broken leg propped on a chair, turning her coffee cup between both hands.
“Probably. Why?”
“No reason.” She looked toward the hallway. “I wondered whether I should wait for dinner.”
“Will you be home late tomorrow?”
It was the third time that week she’d asked about my schedule.
“I’ll text you,” I said.
Her shoulders loosened.
That should have bothered me more than it did.
She asked about my schedule.
***
Elora was my ex-mother-in-law, but she had never felt like an ex-anything.
Even five years after I divorced her son, Shane, she still remembered that I hated cinnamon in my coffee and always ordered an extra slice of cake because she knew I’d steal half of hers.
Elora was my ex-mother-in-law.
My marriage had ended after I discovered Shane was having an affair.
He spent weeks minimizing it, insisting we could recover if I would stop asking questions.
Elora never defended him.
“I’m ashamed of what my son did,” she’d told me. “You deserved better.”
Shane was having an affair.
She still loved Shane, of course.
I never asked her not to.
My only condition was that when she and I met for coffee, we didn’t discuss him.
She respected that boundary until the Tuesday she called me crying.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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