Meeghan sat on her closet floor surrounded by designers labels. In college she’d always dreamed of being surrounded by high fashion. She’d hold her sketchbook to her chest and dream about a closet full of what she called “Italian lovers.”
Now as Meeghan surveyed the wreckage that was her life, she wondered how she could have ever been so silly.
She scooped up a pile of clothes and dumped them into a large trunk. The movers were arriving tomorrow. She needed to focus. All of her mental energy needed to go into helping the children with the transition and starting over. Both kids were at her mom’s house in San Francisco, they suspected nothing.
Meeghan was delicately running her finger across the lace trim of a Gucci corset when she heard Max making his way up the staircase. She felt her shoulders go back and chest come out; her brunch-time confident indignation returned. She was ready for a fight.
Max swung open the large french doors to their bedroom and stared at his wife and the sea of garments surrounding her.
“I was notified that you contacted our lawyer. I’m not going to get mad. I’m not going to ask why. All I want you to know are two things.”
Max walked over to Meeghan and crouched down to meet her eye to eye. “You’re not getting a cent and you are not taking my children.”
With the second half of his sentence, Meeghan felt her resolve crack and shatter like a windshield brought to its knees by a single stray pebble. One of the things that had attracted her to Max was that he always got what he wanted. She’d always pitied the unlucky souls who happened to find themselves opposite him on a real estate dispute or construction debate because when he was done with them…well, they never crossed him again.
Max was out of the room as fast as he’d entered it.
Meeghan closed her eyes and thoughts began to swim in her head. “What am I doing? I need to find myself, reclaim who I was but is this really the way to do it?”
As the question came, so the answer followed. Meeghan knew that it was already too late to turn back. War had been declared and Max smelled blood.
