The entire point of the invitation? They wanted me broken!
For forty minutes, I stood in the shower, letting the heat wash across my shoulders to try to steady my hands.
Not even Hollywood could have done the scene justice, there were no background sounds in my head as the rented black SUVs drove through the gates of the Montgomery mansion. The air smelt like thousands of expensive, white roses and the fear of guilt made me want to throw up. It dawned on me what I was doing – shielding myself behind my children’s backs, and the realization made me feel about as small as Eleanor Montgomery had always claimed I was.
The green dress felt tight around my ribs and made breathing difficult. Diamond earrings, bought just to spite someone, weighed heavily around my ears. When I stretched my hand behind me to take Caleb’s, it was slick with sweat.
“Mama, my neck is pricking,” said Noah, yanking at his stiff collar.
“I know, honey. Only a few more minutes. Don’t take off your shoes. Okay?” My own voice came out reedy and weak.
Going through the door and out to the lawn didn’t feel like a slow-motion triumph. It was a dizzy rush of angry faces, a sharp cry by one of the women near the champagne fountain, and then the excruciating snap of glass breaking in a shattering mess right above our heads on the stone deck. I didn’t look up to see the expression on Eleanor’s face. If I did, she would either scare me back into being too nervous to do what I needed to do or reduce me to tears in front of three hundred people from her social circle.
By the time Ethan managed to get himself down the stairs, he certainly didn’t resemble any sort of Prince Charming. He just looked older than I knew him. He had put on a few pounds on the face, particularly his cheeks. There was a noticeable slump in his shoulders, like a burden he could not name. The silence in the room certainly did not feel good; rather, it felt heavy and very public and extremely embarrassing. And then finally, looking at the three children with their same recognizable brow line, he asked, “Are they mine?”
“Yes,” I replied, as my mouth felt very dry.
There were no speeches about the things his mother had done to me five years ago in that library. I had been preparing my speech about a dozen times in front of the mirror, but at this point, with my sons holding tightly to my dress, I didn’t feel like giving them the pleasure of hearing me express my rage. Instead, all I could do is to look into the eyes of this man whom I once loved deeply, who had taken vows of eternity with me, yet now seemed pathetically small inside his expensive tuxedo and realize how deeply disappointed I was at him. He wouldn’t even stand up for himself back then, let alone stand up for me at this point in time.
However, before she could step off of the limo, the side doors of the car suddenly opened, and Caroline walked out of the car. She looked absolutely stunning in her white French lace worth thousands of dollars. However, when she felt the ambiance in the air, her smile instantly vanished.
And then the side doors opened, and there was the senator’s daughter, Caroline. She was beautiful, a porcelain doll in thousands of dollars worth of French lace, but the smile on her face wilted the minute she got the feel of the atmosphere. She calculated the situation in no more than three seconds.
Caroline burst into tears, a terrible, ugly cry that immediately spoiled her make-up. And before we could even comprehend what was happening, Caroline’s father began screaming, his face turning a nasty shade of purple as he tore at Ethan’s jacket, messing up its pristine white wool.
I looked down at Liam, with his frightened eyes, realizing the enormity of what I had done – I had brought my boys into the fray in order to fulfill my vanity.
“Let’s go,” I said, pulling the boys by the wrists, a little too hard. “Now. Go.”
We almost ran back to the parked SUVs while the wedding degenerated into a screaming war behind us.
The whole way back to the city, the boys bickered about one pack of goldfish, completely unaware that they had ruined a multimillion-dollar business deal that had been disguised as a wedding. The entire time, I sat in the front seat, watching the unfeeling Chicago highway through the glass, knowing that my heart had been squeezed tight for two straight hours. And I didn’t feel triumphant. I felt dirty.
The corporate takedown happened months later, and despite what the financial columns hinted at, it wasn’t a sleek, satisfying boardroom execution. It was just bureaucratic exhaustion. It was endless, draining Zoom calls with forensic accountants, reviewing spreadsheets of bad real estate investments the Montgomerys had hidden for a decade, and authorizing a massive wire transfer that left my marketing agency’s cash reserves uncomfortably lean for a quarter.
When Eleanor finally signed the documents that would terminate the custody battle she had initiated out of spite, she did not appear like a disgraced villain. There was no more arrogance; rather, she had a gray, frail appearance which made her appear eighty rather than sixty years of age. She appeared like a resentful old lady with a heart that had started failing. After leaving the lawyer’s office, I walked to a nearby diner where I sat alone in a plastic booth, eating some greasy French fries. I felt completely numb. No weight lifted off my shoulders.
But here we are, on a Tuesday afternoon, a whole year following the wedding.
The air in our kitchen still smells like burnt toast and Lysol. There are marks left by dried blue finger paints all over my precious wooden floors, very close to the skirting boards, which apparently escape the maid’s attention. Ethan is sitting down in the midst of all this chaos, dressed in an old t-shirt with messy hair, allowing Caleb to plaster fluorescent stars all over his forehead while Noah tries to describe an episode of some cartoon that happened a month ago.
His bloodshot eyes gazed into mine moments ago above the heads of my children. I know how much effort it is for him to come all the way here, every single Tuesday and Thursday at precisely four o’clock in the afternoon. The same routine every time – he doesn’t insist on entering the apartment past the living room, nor does he attempt small talk with me. He simply entertains his own kids.
And yet, I still can’t find it in myself to forgive him. Or I never could. Every time I look into his eyes, my mind jumps back to that cold and desolate North Side apartment where I stood in the darkness by myself and alone, pregnant with three babies at once and worrying whether the heat would even last until morning. All the fear of panic attacks and gum disease due to malnutrition and just that overwhelming fear of knowing that no help was on the way. While he feasted on steak in Lake Forest, I was counting pennies to purchase cheap diapers. There’s no amount of finger paints in the world that would erase those resentments.
But then Liam lets out this breathless, jagged little toddler laugh—the one where he snorts because he’s laughing too hard—because Ethan just did a terrible impression of a tyrannosaurus rex.
I see Ethan as he catches him falling backwards, his movements delicate, his expression tender with a sort of desperate love that is also protective in nature. He loves them. It’s an imperfect form of love, but love all the same.
And as I lean on the cool granite of my kitchen countertop, I know that I don’t have the right to feel this way. My resentment is something I can no longer afford to hold on to. If I insist on barricading that door and playing the part of the avenging mother, I will be the only person suffering, apart from perhaps the three boys currently grappling with their father over on the floor.
I get back into the kitchen where I open the refrigerator and plan dinner, just breathing. This is not an ideal ending. It’s not some kind of tidy resolution or completion for the horror of the last five years. This is simply the hard reality of giving an imperfect man the chance to be better and giving myself a break by putting away the knives.
It’s just Tuesday. And for now, that’s simply enough.
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Bored Daddy
Love and Peace
