Mike fought everything. The prenup. The property division. The support payments. He hired an expensive attorney who promised to find a loophole. He found none.
My agreement was airtight. I had written it myself. In the end, Mike lost the SUV. He lost his share of the condo. He lost nearly everything he had built during our three years together.
And he was ordered to pay me $1,700 a month in support. Every month, on time, until I remarried. The funniest part was that he had nowhere to go afterward.
His family wanted nothing to do with him, and his friends had quietly drifted away. A real estate agent’s income can be uneven, and after paying me, he could barely afford rent. So he accepted the only offer he had. He moved in with my mother.
He moved into her old house with heavily pregnant Katie. When I heard that from mutual friends, I laughed for a solid five minutes. Life sometimes writes better endings than any novelist. Mike and Katie fought constantly under that roof while her pregnancy moved along—seven months, eight, nine. He didn’t even bother hiding how resentful he was.
This was not the life he had imagined. He had wanted stability and a successful wife. Not a pregnant twenty-year-old with no job and no prospects. He had wanted a stylish condo downtown, not a cramped bedroom in his future mother-in-law’s house. He had wanted status. Instead he got embarrassment.
Katie, in turn, learned that her great love was not so great after all. Especially once the handsome, successful man turned into a bitter, broke one. But she was pregnant, unemployed, and had nowhere else to go, so she stayed. She forgave my mother quickly enough for the old secret about her paternity.
Which made a certain grim kind of sense. After all, both women had done the same thing. They had both wrecked a sister’s life over a man. Like mother, like daughter. They deserved each other.
My Aunt Vera filed for divorce immediately. Once she learned her husband had a grown daughter with her own sister, there was nothing left to save. She sold the house, divided the assets, and moved to another state….
