Mrs. Parsons was screaming too, her voice shrill enough to rattle the walls.

"Look at the wife you brought home! She's completely out of control! What kind of daughter-in-law acts like this?"

Jonathan's younger brother and his wife chimed in right on cue.

"Exactly! How can she treat Mom and Dad like they don't even exist?"

"Bro, you really need to set some rules for her. She's practically walking all over our parents. How is that okay?"

Jonathan sighed and knocked on my bedroom door.

"Flora, just come out and apologize to Mom and Dad. Then we can put this whole thing behind us."

"We're their children. We can't treat them like this."

Same as always. Playing mediator. Telling me to swallow it.

I'd lost count of how many times he'd said the same thing. Just bear with it. It'll pass.

But all that bearing with it had cost me my child and my career.

And now they were about to take the house, the only thing my parents had left me.

This time, I was done bearing with it.

I didn't go back out that night. I stayed in my room, closed my eyes, and let myself rest.

The living room was a circus of noise. A child crying. Jonathan's sister-in-law complaining. Mrs. Parsons cursing.

"Jonathan! You'd better take a good look at this wife of yours! She's doing this on purpose, going against me at every turn. She won't even cook dinner. Does she want to starve me to death?"

"I told you from the start she was trouble, but you wouldn't listen. And now look. She can't even give you a son, and she fights us on everything."

The wailing and shouting gave Jonathan a headache. His knocking grew harder.

"Flora, that's enough. Mom and Dad haven't eaten. Stop making a scene."

"Open the door, Flora."

I opened my eyes and looked at the woman in the mirror. Sallow skin. Dark circles. A deep crease between her brows.

His words drifted through the door, and all I felt was a bitter, hollow amusement.

To take care of his parents, I'd quit the job I loved and spent three years drowning in grocery lists and grease-splattered stovetops.

Three years didn't sound like much. But it was enough to grind every last spark of life out of me.

I used to turn heads. I used to have a career I was proud of, a face that was young and bright.

Now all I had was wreckage.

The bitter smile hadn't left my lips when I heard a key turning in the lock.

The next second, Mrs. Parsons stormed in, her face twisted with rage.

She raised her hand and slapped me across the face.

"Who do you think you are? My son calls you and you pretend you can't hear?"

My head snapped to the side. My cheek burned and swelled, and the taste of iron flooded my mouth.

She kept her finger jabbed in my face, still screaming.

"My son works himself half to death earning money for you to spend, and you can't even give him a boy! Fine. But now you won't even listen to him?"

"Go ahead, go out there and find me one daughter-in-law who acts the way you do. One!"

The fury over the caregiving agreement I'd refused to sign, combined with the missed dinner, had finally sent her over the edge. Her eyes bulged, her nostrils flared, as if I'd committed some unforgivable crime.

I turned my head and looked past her, at Jonathan.

Head bowed. Silent. As always.

All these years, that was all he'd ever done. Hide behind his mother. Watch me get pushed around, insulted, humiliated. And then offer that weightless little line:

Just bear with it. It'll pass. Just bear with it and everything will be fine.

Countless rounds of "bearing with it" had worn away every last shred of feeling between us.

Now, looking at him, all I felt was exhaustion.

Mrs. Parsons took my silence for fear. Her voice climbed louder.

"Every cent you spend comes from my son's pocket! I ask you to look after us in our old age and you refuse. Now you won't even cook a meal. So tell me, what exactly did my son marry you for?"

"Without my son, you're nothing!"

So every penny spent was earned by her son?

I let out a cold laugh and turned to Jonathan.

"Is that what you think too?"

His eyes darted away. After a long, painful silence, he finally spoke, his voice hesitant.

"Flora, Mom's an elder. She's saying all this for your own good. Just... bear with it, and it'll pass."

"We're all family. Do we really need to make a scene?"

I drew a deep breath and nodded.

"Okay."

The tension between Jonathan's brows eased. He thought I'd caved again.

But the very next second, I continued.

"Sure. Let's see just how ugly this can get."

I turned back to face my mother-in-law.

"Mom, you say everything I've spent over the years came from your son. So tell me, do you even know how much your son makes every month?"

The question caught her off guard. Her eyes shifted, guilt flickering across her face.

"Jonathan makes... he makes tens of thousands a month."

"You think everyone's like you? Sitting around the house all day doing absolutely nothing?"

I tugged at the corner of my lips, my gaze dripping with scorn.

"He makes two thousand a month. Half goes to his car payment. The rest goes straight to you."

"You keep saying I've been spending his money. Go ahead, ask him. Has a single dollar of his ever made it into my pocket?"

"Five years ago, when you needed surgery for your kidney stones, I pulled out my entire wedding fund to cover the bill."

"And Dad."

Mr. Parsons Sr., standing stone-faced outside the door, flinched.

"When your pulmonary emphysema landed you in the ICU for a month, I quit my job. I gave up my year-end bonus to take care of you."

"And when Jonathan's brother got married, when his wife had her baby... every expense this family has racked up over the years, which one of them didn't come out of my account?"

"And now you're all standing here telling me I've been living off Jonathan Parsons' money. Don't you find that laughable?"

The air froze the moment I finished. Jonathan's face had turned a deep, mottled red.

"Flora, why are you bringing all this up? Is money the only thing you care about?"

"I never realized you were such a materialistic woman."

Materialistic?

If I were truly materialistic, I never would have married a spineless man like him.

Mrs. Parsons latched on like she'd finally found an opening, sinking her teeth in.

"What's all this 'your money, his money'? You're family. Why are you keeping score?"

"Besides, I never told you to spend that money. I never told you to quit your job. At the end of the day, you only have yourself to blame for not being able to juggle a career and a family. What does any of that have to do with us?"

A bitter laugh escaped me before I could stop it.

Just moments ago, every word out of her mouth was about how I'd been spending her son's money.

Now she'd flipped the script entirely.

Back when she needed that surgery and the money was urgent, everyone had hinted that I should hand over my wedding fund. When Mr. Parsons Sr. was hospitalized, they told me over and over that my job was pointless, that I should just quit and come home.

But now, coming out of her mouth, every sacrifice I'd ever made was somehow my own fault.

Once upon a time, I might have fought back. Argued. Made my case.

But now, all I felt was bone-deep exhaustion.

I had no patience left for any of them. I simply lifted my gaze to Jonathan.

"Forget it, Jonathan. Let's get a divorce."

The moment the words left my mouth, every pair of eyes in the room snapped to me in disbelief.

A flash of panic darted through Jonathan's eyes.

"Flora, what are you talking about?"

I pressed my fingers against my temples and repeated myself.

"I said, let's get a divorce. I'm done."

He saw the look on my face and realized I meant it. His composure cracked.

"Flora, Mom just said some harsh things, that's all. How can we hold it against her? She's our elder."

"Don't be mad... just let me—"

Jonathan scrambled to explain, but before he could finish, his mother cut him off with a sharp bark.

"Jonathan, don't you dare beg her. She wouldn't have the guts to actually divorce you. Women like her are the most calculating of all. She's just waiting for you to go soft so she can get her hands on our demolition compensation."

"I've seen your type a thousand times," she sneered at me. "Let me tell you something: without you, my son will have women lining up. But you? Who's going to want a parentless, second-marriage piece of trash like you?"

Jonathan said nothing. Again.

I knew he'd chosen to believe his mother. He was betting I wouldn't actually leave.

I looked at him standing there, eyes lowered, jaw set in silence.

And just like that, all those years of holding on felt like nothing more than a joke.

"You want a divorce? Then get the hell out. Right now. And don't come crawling back when the house gets demolished and there's money on the table!"

Mrs. Parsons turned to Ina. "Throw her stuff out. This room will make a nice playroom for Charlie Abbott."

One look from her mother-in-law was all it took. Ina grabbed my belongings, crammed them into my suitcase without care, and hurled the whole thing out the door.

I picked up the suitcase from where it had toppled on the floor. My face was blank as I swept my gaze across the lot of them, every last one brimming with calculation.

Eight years. Eight years of cleaning up this family's messes, and I was done.

I stepped into the elevator. Hailed a cab.

The moment I sat down in that backseat, my heart lurched to life, hammering so hard I could feel it in my throat.

I checked into a hotel, set my luggage down, and immediately called a lawyer to draft the divorce papers.

There were only three days left before the demolition agreement was set to be signed. I was about to send off the divorce papers when a friend forwarded me a video.

Thirty minutes long.

In it, Mrs. Parsons sat with her face mottled purple and blue, sobbing through her accusations. She wailed about how I'd abused her and Mr. Parsons while they lay bedridden, how I'd bullied her son...

"After my son married her, he worked himself to the bone every single day to provide for her. She didn't want to work, so he even let her quit her job. And now she turns around and says the money he gave her wasn't enough."

"She has health problems. She can't have children. I didn't want to make things hard for her, so I just asked my younger son to bring his child and stay with us for a while. She wouldn't even allow that. Called us freeloaders."

Roland appeared in the video too, accusing me of manipulating him.

"When I was in college, my sister-in-law wouldn't let Mom or my brother send me any living expenses. I had to do backbreaking manual labor just to scrape by. I've still got a scar on my lower back from getting hit by a piece of rebar."

"Now I've finally got a family of my own. Mom and Dad's health is getting better. My brother's house is about to be demolished. And she wants to take our compensation money and kick us out? She's trying to destroy us!"

I watched their fabricated accusations, and the blood in my veins went cold, degree by degree.

My hands shook so badly I could barely hold my phone.

After I married Jonathan, I had become nothing more than an unpaid servant to this family.

When they were broke, I'd scraped together my last thousand dollars to wire it to Roland, terrified he'd go hungry at school.

And now they were twisting everything, smearing me as their abuser?

That scar on his back? He hadn't gotten it from manual labor. He'd gotten it from harassing a female classmate in college. Her boyfriend beat the hell out of him.

Her parents showed up at our door threatening to press charges for sexual assault.

I paid seventy thousand dollars in damages to make it go away.

I spent my money. I ran myself ragged cleaning up their disasters, one after another.

And now, in their version of the story, I was the one robbing them.

My chest felt like a boulder had been dropped on it. I couldn't breathe.

The video went trending within hours. The comments section became an open courtroom with me on trial.

"This woman is a walking curse. The second she left, the family's luck turned around. Now that they're doing well, she comes crawling back? Absolutely pathetic!"