“Important?” I asked quietly. “Colin, children aren’t family investments. We already have a family.”
His expression hardened.
“No,” he replied coldly. “What I have is a marriage that failed to give this family what it expected.”
The silence that followed felt suffocating.
Hannah squeezed my hand tighter.
Claire pressed against my leg.
My mother-in-law leaned forward across the table, her eyes narrowing.
“You’ve embarrassed this family long enough.”
At that moment my father-in-law calmly placed a white envelope on the table and slid it toward me.
When I opened it, the neatly printed documents inside made my stomach tighten.
Divorce papers.
Colin watched me carefully.
“Sign them,” he said. “You can leave tonight.”
For a moment breathing felt strangely difficult.
“You planned this?” I whispered. “In front of our daughters?”
My father-in-law answered instead.
“In front of witnesses,” he corrected calmly. “So no one can say we treated you unfairly.”
A bitter laugh escaped before I could stop it.
“Unfairly?” I said softly. “You’ve spent years acting as if I’m defective simply because we had daughters.”
My mother-in-law suddenly rose from her chair.
In the heated moment she raised her hand in anger, and I felt a sharp sting across my face that made the entire room blur for a second while my daughters cried out beside me.
Before I could recover, Colin grabbed my arm—not to steady me, but to pull me toward the front hallway.
“Let go of me,” I shouted.
His voice dropped into a furious whisper.
