Peggy picked up the envelope with steady fingers she didn’t feel. Her mind was doing something strange—part of it wanted to scream, to stand and slap the table and demand an explanation, and part of it was… numb, as if her body had decided emotion was too expensive to spend right now.
She stood.
Her legs held.
She walked to the door without saying a word to Steven, Catherine, or Michael.
“Peggy,” Marcus called behind her, voice urgent. “Please. If you need anything—if you have questions—call me.”
She nodded once without turning.
She made it to the parking garage. She found her car. She sat in the driver’s seat of her ten-year-old Honda Civic, hands on the steering wheel, and stared straight ahead.
And then the tears arrived like a flood breaking through a dam.
She sobbed until her lungs hurt. Until her chest tightened. Until her mouth tasted like salt and humiliation.
Because it wasn’t only that she had been left with almost nothing.
It was that she had been described as nothing.
A domestic service provider. A companion. An accessory to Richard’s “real” life.
Forty years, erased in ink.