She left without another word. There was nothing left to say. The car she drove away in was old, I noticed. Things really had caught up with her.
I stood at the window and watched her go, and I waited to feel something. Triumph, maybe. The satisfaction of seventeen years. But it didn’t come. What came, instead, was something quieter and sadder — a kind of grief, not for her, but for the woman she could have been, and the mother those two magnificent boys deserved and never got from her.
She’d had it all, once. Two perfect babies and a man who would have walked through fire for her. And she’d looked at it and decided a yacht was worth more. You can’t take anything from a woman who already threw away the only thing that was ever worth having. The universe had handled her punishment a long time before she ever knocked on my door. I was just the one who finally said it out loud.
