“If you’re going to take that tone, maybe we should just get a divorce.”
Michael said it across our dining table in the exact same flat, bored voice he used to complain about midtown traffic or the leaky faucet in the guest bathroom.
For five long seconds, the only sound in the room was silverware against porcelain.
I just stared at him.
To my left, his mother, Carol, kept pushing steamed rice around her plate as if she had suddenly gone deaf. Across from me, his sister, Jessica, lowered her eyes, but not fast enough to hide the little smirk tugging at the corner of her mouth. Beside her, her twelve-year-old son, Tony, reached across the table for another helping of the sweet-and-sour chicken I had spent two hours making from scratch.
Not one person at that table told Michael he had gone too far. Nobody even blinked.
And in that silence, the last illusion of my seven-year marriage cracked down the middle. I wasn’t sitting with my family. I was sitting in a room full of people who had already decided I could be thrown away.
It had started over three cardboard boxes.
They had been delivered that afternoon, and I had stacked them neatly by the front door because I was too tired to carry them to the bedroom. That was my mistake. Jessica saw them the moment she came out of the guest room, which she had been calling her room for almost five years now.
“Three more packages today, Althia?” she said before I had even set the appetizers down. “What could you possibly need? You don’t even go to an office.”
My hand went to my stomach under the tablecloth before I could stop it.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
TAP ” READ MORE ” 👇
