I was surviving my marriage instead of living it.
Olivia didn’t care.
“If you’re told to do something, you do it immediately,” she snapped one morning when I asked for rest. “Don’t give me excuses.”
To her, a daughter-in-law was never family.
She was labor.
And five months after I moved into that house, things sank even lower.
Larry’s sister returned.
Kelly.
Fresh from a divorce, simmering with resentment, hauling her child along like excess baggage.
She flung her suitcase into the guest room and smiled at me with the expression of someone who had already decided I was the enemy.
“It’s my fault really,” she announced theatrically on her first day, sounding almost proud of the wreckage she’d caused. “I made… choices. My husband couldn’t handle it.”
I didn’t ask what those choices were.
She volunteered the explanation anyway.
