At nine sharp, Ryan came into the kitchen in a silk robe looking like a man already rehearsing his victory speech. He found the note, read it, and smiled with such smug delight I almost laughed. He sprinted upstairs. I switched the feed to the bedroom.
Donna was in my bed, propped against my upholstered headboard, wearing one of my silk sleep masks like a crown. Ryan burst in waving the note.
“I told you she’d cave,” he said.
Donna read it and all the ugliness in her surfaced cleanly. “These career women always talk big until they’re about to lose a handsome man.”
There it was.
Not just entitlement.
A worldview.
In Donna’s universe, women like me were anomalies that eventually corrected themselves by surrendering to male approval. My independence offended her because it made her own system look obsolete. She didn’t want coexistence. She wanted hierarchy.