My simple cotton dresses and faded nursing uniforms spilled out onto the wet grass while the mud immediately began to ruin the few possessions I still owned. “You actually thought you were one of us because you managed to trick my son into a wedding, didn’t you?” Madeline asked as she began to walk down the stairs with her expensive heels clicking rhythmically against the stone.
She stopped just a few feet away from me and curled her lip in a sneer that showed she had been waiting for this moment since the day I arrived. “The fairytale is officially over because Garrett is gone and you no longer have any claim to this family or its fortune,” she stated with a cold and clinical finality.
Behind her on the sheltered porch stood Skylar, who was Garrett’s younger sister, and she was holding her phone up to record every second of my humiliation with a cruel smirk on her face. “Make sure you get a good look at the camera so all our followers can see the gold digger finally getting what she deserves,” Skylar mocked while she adjusted the angle of her lens to capture the mud staining my clothes.
I felt as though I should have been crying or screaming in outrage, but my heart had already been broken into a thousand pieces during the long nights I spent at the hospital. I simply watched them with a quiet gaze because they saw a helpless widow who had lost her only protection, yet they had no idea what Garrett had actually planned for our future.
I walked forward through the wet grass and ignored the sound of their laughter while I knelt down in the mud to reach for something that had fallen near a deep puddle. It was our wedding album and the leather cover was now smeared with dirt, which partially obscured the image of Garrett’s radiant smile on our happiest day.
