But now he’s rewriting history to make you the villain. I feel so stupid for believing him when he said he loved me. You’re not stupid for believing someone when they say they love you. You’re not stupid for trusting your husband. You’re not stupid for wanting to save your marriage. Austin is the one who lied, cheated, and manipulated.
Austin is the one who should feel stupid. But Maria, I have nothing left. He’s taking the house, most of our money, all the furniture. I’m going to be 31 years old, starting over with nothing. And now he wants to parade me around like some cautionary tale about bitter divorced women. Then don’t let him.
What do you mean? I mean, don’t show up to his baby shower looking broken and desperate like he expects. Don’t give him the satisfaction of seeing you destroyed. Maria, I am destroyed. No, you’re hurt. There’s a difference. You’re hurt because someone you love turned out to be cruel. But you’re not destroyed unless you let him destroy you.
I don’t know how to not let him destroy me. You start by remembering who you were before Austin Adabio made you believe you were worthless. You start by remembering that your value as a woman has nothing to do with whether you can give some man a baby. You start by remembering that being childless doesn’t make you defective.
Being divorced doesn’t make you a failure and being alone doesn’t make you pathetic. I don’t remember who I was before Austin. Then you figure out who you want to be after Austin. And I guarantee the woman you become will be stronger than the woman he threw away. After she hung up with Maria, she sat in her empty house and thought about Austin’s plan.
He wanted her to show up broken, desperate, and pathetic so he could use her pain to justify his betrayal. He wanted his family and friends to look at her and think, “No wonder Austin left her.” But for the first time since this nightmare had started, she began to wonder, “What if I didn’t show up the way Austin expected? What if instead of being the tragic figure in Austin’s redemption story, I became something else entirely? She looked at that baby shower invitation again, but this time she wasn’t reading it as a victim. She was reading it as a
woman who was about to discover exactly what she was capable of. Austin had made one crucial mistake in his plan to humiliate her publicly. He’d given her advanced notice, and he’d completely underestimated who she might become once she stopped believing his lies about who she was. The final divorce papers arrived on a Thursday morning, delivered by a courier who looked embarrassed to be handing her documents that would officially end her marriage.
She signed for them with shaking hands, then sat at her kitchen table, reading through the settlement agreement that made Austin’s victory complete. The house had to be vacated within 30 days. She was getting a small sum from their joint savings, barely enough for first and last month’s rent on a decent apartment. Austin was keeping the car since it was in his name, which meant she’d need to figure out transportation.
