Those three words landed harder than anything else because they were not meant cruelly. Just dismissively. A shack in the woods. Not worth the fight. Ethan rolled his eyes when the judge confirmed it stayed with me. They had won everything that mattered. Neither of them cared enough about an old one-bedroom cabin on a northern lake to steal it too.
That exact texture of dismissal stayed with me.
If they had fought over it, I might have understood greed. But they didn’t. They dismissed it the way Ethan had dismissed so many parts of me for years—not with rage, but with certainty that if something could not immediately improve his life, it had no real value at all.