“If you want to leave, go by yourself. My son is staying with me,” my mother-in-law said, slamming her fist on the table as if she had just passed judgment.
What she didn’t know was that I had been waiting almost two years to hear those words.
My name is Sabrina Miller, I am thirty-five years old, and I live in Phoenix. Today I own a small apartment and a candle-making workshop, but for three years I was the kept woman and parasite of the Bennett family.
I married Christopher when I was twenty-seven years old. He worked for a logistics company, and I worked in a cosmetics factory in Mesa. Since my father had abandoned my mother, I desperately wanted to start a stable family.
From the first meal with his parents, I understood that his mother, Gertrude, did not love me at all.
“You’re not the woman I imagined for my son, but he insists, so I’ll have to put up with it,” she said in front of everyone.
Christopher squeezed my hand under the table to comfort me. I mistook that gesture for bravery, but years later I would understand that he only knew how to comfort me in secret and never how to defend me in public.
For the first two years, we lived in a rented apartment in Glendale. After my father-in-law died, Christopher asked me to move in with his mother in the Sun City neighborhood just for a single year.
I accepted her request out of love and guilt.
On the first day, Gertrude greeted me with her arms crossed near the front door.
“Is that all you brought? Knowing how vain you are, I thought you’d have valuable things,” she sneered.
I looked at Christopher for support, but he simply looked down at the floor.
Within a week, I was already getting up at five-thirty to cook, clean, do laundry, and run endless errands. Gertrude spent her afternoons watching television and looking for my faults.
One day she dropped crumbs directly in front of me while I was mopping the floor.
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