My Ex-Husband’s Mother Passed Away. He Calls “Help with the Funeral!”. Me — “My MIL died 3 years ago.”

 

Part 1

I was forty the year the phone rang with a voice I’d trained myself to file under “unknown number” and “not my problem.”

But that’s the end of the story. Or close to it.

The beginning—my real beginning—was my father’s kitchen and the sound of a leaky tap.

When I was eight, the tap over our sink started dripping. Not a polite drip, either. A furious, insistent plink that echoed in the small house like a metronome for my father’s worry. He stood there one Saturday morning with a wrench in one hand and a roll of Teflon tape in the other, explaining threads and seals and patience while I sat cross-legged on the counter.

“We could just call a plumber,” I’d said, swinging my legs.

“We could,” he said. “And sometimes you should. But sometimes you look at a thing and say, ‘I can learn this.’”

Years later, when my first marriage cracked around me, I’d think about that day a lot. Turns out, when you grow up with a man who fixes things, it takes you a while to realize some things are not meant to be repaired. Some things need to be replaced. Some things, if you’re really honest, should never have been installed in the first place.

My name is Leah. I’m the senior manager of a creative team at an ad agency where I spend my days convincing people they need shoes a half-step different from the ones they already have. I’m good at it. I know how to take three adjectives from a brief (“authentic,” “aspirational,” “warm”) and build an entire universe around them.

It took me embarrassingly long to realize I hadn’t been nearly as careful with the brand I built for my own life.

When I met Mason, I was twenty-six and exhausted in that specific way only assistant account managers know—too many late nights, too many clients, not enough boundaries. A friend dragged me to a backyard barbecue. He was there, standing too close to the grill, making jokes about marinades and sales quotas.

“I sell TVs,” he told me, early on. “I know how to make a picture crystal clear.”

He had a salesman’s smile and an easy laugh and a confidence that made me feel like I could step into his life and it would already be outlined for me. My father liked him well enough—at least at first—and when Mason proposed under a string of fairy lights six months later, I said yes.

“What about where we’ll live?” I asked one night, sitting on his hand-me-down couch, picking at a snag in the upholstery. “I still have my lease, but…”

He looked at me like I’d asked why the sky was blue. “We’ll move in with Mom,” he said. “Obviously.”

“Obviously?” I repeated.

“Dad’s gone,” he said, with the noble air of someone volunteering for a burden no one had put on his shoulders. “She’s alone in that big house. It’s pathetic. Besides, she helped me buy my car. We owe her. It would kill her if we didn’t.”

“Can’t we find our own place nearby?” I suggested. “Visit her a lot?”

He laughed. “You can’t say no after I’ve told her the plan, Leah,” he said. “That would be cruel. She’s excited. She cried when I told her we were coming.”

I’d never had a mother who cried over me. The idea of being someone’s answer, someone’s joy, softened the edges of my hesitation. I agreed.

The first time I met his mother properly—the first time she leaned her whole weight against the frame of what would be “our” front door—I understood why my father’s handshake with Mason had been so long, so searching.

“From now on,” she said, lips painted into a precise line, “you will handle the housework.”

I almost laughed, waiting for the punchline.

“And I’ll help,” Mason added quickly, his eyes flicking between us.

She shot him a look so sharp he flinched. “You will work and pay the bills,” she corrected. “That’s how a man lives. The woman keeps the home. That’s what Leah will do. Any complaints?”

“I work, too,” I said, trying to keep my tone light. “Full time. At an agency. Long hours sometimes. We can split things. I don’t mind chores, but—”

“You’re the daughter-in-law,” she interrupted, already turning away. “The house is your responsibility.”

Mason hugged me in the hallway later. “She’s old-fashioned,” he said. “She doesn’t mean anything by it. Just… humor her.”

I wanted him to be right. I wanted to be the kind of woman who could roll her eyes and pick her battles and not feel her chest tighten when someone treated her like a live-in maid with a marriage license.

So I got up at 5:30.

I scrubbed bathrooms before status meetings. I packed lunches while answering client emails. I learned the precise way she liked her tea—teabag out at exactly ninety seconds, one sugar, never honey, milk in the cup before the water—and what happened if I got the order wrong. (“Back in my day, we knew how to brew a proper cup,” she would sniff, pouring it down the sink.)

Mason worked late. Television sales in the age of online streaming apparently required heroic amounts of in-store presence. He came home tired. He watched me wash dishes and said things like “You’re amazing,” but he didn’t pick up a sponge.

A year in, the questions started.

We were in the kitchen. The walls smelled like spices and grease. It was a Tuesday that had felt like a Wednesday all day.

“So,” she said, rinsing her plate in the sink I’d just cleaned. “Pregnant yet?”

I almost dropped the glass in my hand. “No, not yet,” I said. “We’re—” I glanced at Mason, standing behind her, scrolling his phone. “We’re not in a rush.”

She sniffed. “It’s been a year.”

“We want to enjoy time as just us for a bit,” I tried. I’d read that line in a magazine, in an article about “handling pushy relatives.” It sounded thin in my mouth.

“What’s to enjoy?” she said. “Children give a family purpose.”

“We’re building careers,” Mason put in, not looking up. “We have time.”

She turned on him. “You work in a store,” she said. “You’re not a surgeon.” Then back to me. “Don’t be selfish, Leah. A wife without a child is like…a tree without fruit. Decorative. Ultimately useless.”

The word useless hung in the air like steam.

Our OB-GYN was kind, pragmatic. “You’re thirty,” she said. “You’ve been trying for a year. Let’s see what’s going on.”

What followed was a blur of blood tests, basal temperature charts, and timed sex that sucked all romance from the word intimacy. Every month, I took a pregnancy test two days earlier than I should. Every month, I cried on the toilet with the door locked. Every month, I bought pads and overheard my mother-in-law in the hall.

“Still,” she’d sigh. “Her problem.”

When the first round of fertility drugs failed, she cornered me in the laundry room.

“I knew it,” she said, arms full of a towel I’d already folded. “Your body is selfish. My poor son.”

“We’re working with a doctor,” I said. “It’s not—”

“Your fault?” she interrupted. “Isn’t it?” She tilted her head. “You had a mother who left. Maybe it runs in the blood—women who can’t do what they’re supposed to. At least you won’t pass it on.”

Something in me fractured that day.

I didn’t throw the basket. I didn’t scream. I folded another towel and put it on the top of the stack, because that’s who I had become—a woman who kept adding layers of work on top of her own hurt.

Two years. Three.

The day of the divorce is imprinted in my memory in weird details: the way the late afternoon sun caught the dust on the mantle; the quiet drip of the faucet (no one had learned to fix it, despite my father’s lessons); the pattern on the tablecloth my mother-in-law had picked—garish flowers on beige.

We were eating dinner. Rice, vegetables, grilled chicken. I’d cooked, of course.

She set her fork down. “Nothing?” she asked, not looking at me. “Still?”

I didn’t answer. There was nothing new to say.

“I waited for three years,” she said. “I can’t waste my youth like this.”

Mason, chewing, nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “We’ve tried. It’s clearly not happening.”

“It’s clearly Leah’s problem,” she said. “We should not be stuck with a barren wife forever.”

The word hit me with the force of a truck. Old-fashioned, clinical, cruel. I laughed then. It came out wrong—high and brittle.

“Barren?” I repeated. “That’s how you’re describing your son’s wife?”

“You should be grateful we put it off this long,” she said. “We could have divorced you after the first year. Mason,” she added, turning to him, “we don’t owe her anything. End this now. Find a nicer girl. Prettier. From a better family. One who can give you a child.”

I looked at him. I needed him to say No. Needed him to say Stop. Needed him to say You don’t talk to my wife like that.

He shrugged. “She’s got a point,” he said. “I mean, what’s the future here? Just…this? Us? Forever?”

“I thought that was the idea,” I said, whisper-quiet.

He reached into the drawer by his elbow and pulled out a stack of papers I recognized too well—the divorce forms you can print off the state website.

“I’ve already filled these out,” he said. “All you have to do is sign.”

“You’ve…what?” The fog inside me cleared so fast the room blurred. “Without talking to me?”

“I’m talking to you now,” he said. “We’re done, Leah. Pack your stuff and leave tomorrow. I don’t want to see your face. You bring…bad luck.”

The cruelty of it was almost elegant in its bluntness.

I stared at him. At her. At the life I had built around their preferences. Then I stood.

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll leave. But not because you’re telling me to. Because I’m done living with people who think I’m a defective appliance.”

Mila scoffed. “Big words for a woman whose only value is what her broken body can’t do,” she said. At the door, she added, “Don’t show that jinx of a face here again. I can’t afford more misfortune.”

Packing hurt less than I thought it would. Most of my real life fit into two suitcases and three boxes—clothes, favorite coffee mug, my mother’s old recipe notebook, the plant Dad had helped me repot. The rest—wedding china I’d never liked, his college sports memorabilia, her lace doilies—I left.

Dad met me at the curb in his truck. He hugged me and didn’t say I told you so, even though he could have.

“You better not have scratched the desk,” he said gruffly, eyeing the box containing my mother’s heirloom. “She’ll haunt you.”

We laughed. It broke something open in my chest that had been sealed too long.

At his house, in the room I’d last inhabited as a surly seventeen-year-old, I lay on my back and stared at the ceiling.

“You’re not broken,” Dad said, standing in the doorway. “You’re just…in the wrong place. We’ll fix that.”

“Not everything can be fixed,” I said.

“Maybe not,” he acknowledged. “But we can decide where not to waste our tools.”

 

Part 2

Divorce does not cure infertility. It does not magically give you a baby. It doesn’t even give you closure right away.

What it did give me was silence I could finally hear myself in.

I went back to work. I stopped taking stupid fertility pills that made my moods swing like a gate in a storm. I started eating full meals without someone reminding me of their “investment” in my body. I started staying late at the agency because I wanted to, not because I dreaded going home.

My boss noticed.

“You’re on fire lately,” she said after a particularly well-received pitch. “Whatever you’re doing, keep doing it.”

What I was doing was not washing two extra sets of dishes. Not being called barren over rice. Not waking up at 5:30 to scrub a stranger’s bathroom. Who knew self-respect was this good for productivity?

Clients started asking for me specifically. The vague “senior strategist” on my business card sprouted extra lines—lead, director of, head of. My salary caught up with my talent. For the first time since college, I had my own apartment. It was small, with thin walls and a view of a parking lot, but it was mine. No one rearranged my kitchen cabinets. No one sighed at my uterus.

My friends, who had watched my marriage dissolve with equal parts outrage and helplessness, started inviting me out again without checking if I was “up for it” like I was a wounded animal. One Friday, after an especially grueling week, my colleague Dana nudged me at the bar.

“There’s someone from client side you should meet,” she said. “He’s weirdly normal. It’s refreshing.”

“Normal?” I wrinkled my nose. “That sounds…boring.”

“In a good way,” she laughed. “Like…he uses a calendar and pays bills on time and knows where his own salt is.”

The client was Owen Forest. Mid-thirties, smart, patient, with the kind of dry humor that doesn’t announce itself until it’s too late and you’re already enjoying it. He ran the in-house marketing team at a tech company we’d just landed. In meetings, he listened more than he talked. When he did talk, everyone listened.

“Leah, right?” he said, extending a hand. “Love what you did with the Adams pitch.”

“Thanks,” I said. “You made a mean Gantt chart.”

He laughed. “That’s the sexiest thing anyone’s ever said to me.”

We started grabbing coffee after status calls. Then lunch. Then one night he said, “It’s probably too soon to say this, but I’m interested in this being more than…colleagues who order the same salad.”

“I was married,” I said, the sentence tasting less like confession and more like context now. “It ended badly. His mother was…a full-time sport.”

He nodded. “I know something about bad endings,” he said. “My ex and I realized we wanted different lives and we actually listened to that. I have no interest in running that play again. I’m here to build something…mutual. And for what it’s worth, my mother is…nice. Boring nice. The kind of woman who brings cookies to the DMV on purpose.”

I didn’t believe him. Not at first. Mothers-in-law belonged to one category in my mind: hazards.

He invited me to dinner at his mom’s house six months in. I said I’d think about it. Then I thought about it, for long enough that he finally said, “You know you’re allowed to meet the people who made me without marrying me first, right?”

“Fine,” I said. “But if she starts telling me how to wash my hands, I’m out.”

Owen’s mother, Sadie, opened the door in an apron and a cloud of cinnamon.

“You must be Leah,” she said, wiping her hands on a towel before offering them. “I’ve heard a lot about you. All good. If Owen said anything else I would’ve hit him with a spoon. Come in. Do you eat pie?”

“She says she does,” Owen called from the kitchen. “But she’s about to learn what real pie is.”

Dinner wasn’t a test; it was a conversation. Sadie asked about my job, not just what I did but what I liked about it. When I mentioned my father’s shop, her eyes lit up. “My dad was a mechanic,” she said. “The smell of oil makes me think of Christmas.”

At one point, she put her fork down and said, “I know you were married before, honey. You don’t need to tell me why unless you want to. But please know this: you don’t have to prove anything to me. Owen’s face when he talks about you tells me what I need. If you and I have a relationship one day, I want it to be because you like me, not because anyone declared it.”

I excused myself to the bathroom, sat on the edge of the tub, and cried so hard I had to splash my face with cold water before I went back so she wouldn’t think I hated her pot roast.

“I told you she was normal,” Owen whispered later.

“Normal is underrated,” I said.

We got married in a small ceremony at the botanical gardens. Dad walked me down the path and muttered, “If this one hurts you, I’ll key his car,” which made me snort-laugh in the middle of my vows. Sadie cried in the second row, dabbing her eyes with a floral handkerchief that seemed genuinely, not performatively, soft.

We didn’t move in with her. We got an apartment fifteen minutes away, the kind of distance that made drop-ins rare and invited dinners more fun.

“We’re not doing…that,” Owen had said early on, when the topic of living arrangements came up. “I love my mother. I also love going home to my wife and not having anyone critique the way I fold towels.”

“One day you may have a daughter-in-law,” I told Sadie over coffee. “If I can give you one piece of unsolicited advice: do whatever you can to make her feel like she’s not auditioning.”

She put her hand over mine. “Thank you,” she said quietly. “My own mother-in-law was…something. Not quite the monster yours was, from what I’ve heard, but close. I vowed if I ever got the chance, I’d be a soft place to land, not another test.”

“You already are,” I said.

Two years into our marriage, I took a pregnancy test more out of habit than hope. When the second line turned pink, I sat on the bathroom floor and laughed and sobbed and pressed my hand to my belly as if I could feel something more than nerves.

The OB smiled at the ultrasound. “Everything looks good,” she said. “Textbook eight weeks.”

I cried harder.

“Is this your first?” she asked.

“Probably my only,” I said. “Which is fine. Which is…more than fine.”

Sadie’s reaction when we told her is burned into my brain brighter than some of my own milestones.

“You’re going to be a grandma,” I said, sitting at her kitchen table with my hand wrapped around a mug of tea. Owen squeezed my thigh under the table.

Her mouth opened. Closed. Her eyes flooded. “I need to sit down,” she said, though she was already seated. Then she laughed through tears. “Boy or girl?”

“We don’t know yet,” I said. “We’re calling it Bean for now.”

“Bean,” she repeated, tasting it. “Perfect.”

She did not say How. She did not say I thought you couldn’t. She did not say So it was Him, not you. She just hugged me.

When June was born, screaming like a siren, Sadie was there, waiting in the hallway with a bouquet of lilies and a new car seat Owen had let her buy even though we already had one. She held June like something both fragile and infinite.

“Hi, June Bug,” she whispered. “I’ve been waiting for you.”

The next five years were a blur of toddlerhood, deadlines, and Tuesdays in Sadie’s kitchen. She taught June how to roll biscuit dough, how to hum while she stirred, how to say “no, thank you” instead of just “no,” and how to apologize for things she actually did, not for existing.

“When I die,” Sadie said once, drying dishes, “don’t let anyone tell you you owe them your life because of me. I did what I did because I wanted to. Remember that.”

“You’re not allowed to die,” I said. “We need you to babysit when June is a teenager.”

The universe does not bargain. Sadie’s diagnosis was swift and stupid: pancreatic cancer. Chemo gave us three extra months. Hospice gave us dignity. She died at home, holding my hand and Owen’s, June’s head asleep on my lap.

“You gave me back the chance to be the mother-in-law I always wanted to be,” she whispered to me. “Continue being happy. That will be how you thank me.”

I did the thing therapists tell you to do. I grieved. I let myself mourn the woman who had stepped into a hole left by another and filled it with pie, advice, and unconditional love. I cried in grocery stores when I passed the aisle with her favorite tea. I sat in the parking lot of the church we held her service in and thought about the phrases “in-laws” and “out-laws” and which side of the hyphen she’d fallen on.

Life, stubbornly, kept happening.

Work moved on. June learned to read. I found myself calling Dad more often, realizing he was aging in ways I needed to pay attention to. Owen and I argued about stupid things and apologized without involving other people—a quiet skill I’d never seen modeled before.

I did not think much about Mason. Occasionally, a piece of news about the electronics store where he worked closing down a branch would drift through my social media like debris, but he lived in a part of the internet I didn’t visit anymore. His mother, if I wondered about her at all, existed for me as a cautionary tale and a name I did not speak around my daughter.

 

Part 3

The day the phone rang, the sky over Portland was the color of wet concrete. June was sitting cross-legged on the rug, making a city out of Legos. Owen was in his office on a call, gesturing at the screen like his hands could speed up a colleague’s brain. I was chopping peppers for chili, the smell sharp and green.

My phone buzzed on the counter. Unknown number. I almost let it go to voicemail, then picked up, half expecting a spam robot offering me an extended warranty on a car I didn’t own.

“Hello?”

“Leah?”

The voice reached across ten years like a smell you thought you’d scrubbed from your clothes. My grip tightened on the knife.

“Who is this?” I asked, though some part of me already knew.

“It’s me,” he said. “Mason.”

I set the knife down carefully, blade away from my fingers. My heart did a slow, muted backflip—not from longing, but from memory.

“What do you want?” I asked, keeping my tone genteel. The way you talk to a stranger at a bus stop.

He sucked in a breath, the sound wet and shaky.

“I have some…unfortunate news,” he said, pausing for effect. Old habits. “Mom passed away.”

His mother had been a “Mom” I’d never claimed for myself. Hearing the words, I felt…nothing. No sad trombone. No confetti. Just the observation that his universe had shifted and mine had not.

“I see,” I said.

“So,” he barreled on, “I’m calling because there’s no time to…to be sad. We have to handle the funeral. The arrangements. There’s so much to do. You know how she liked things just so.”

I pictured Mila’s house, with its stiff furniture and stiff opinions, now with a stiff behind a casket somewhere in the mix. I pictured a guest list entirely composed of people she’d criticized behind their backs. I did not picture myself there.

“You need to come over,” he said. “Help. Like…old times. She always said you were like a real daughter to her.” He hiccupped, either in fake or real grief; I couldn’t tell.

I thought of her calling me barren. Of her calling me useless. Of her telling me never to show my “jinx face” around her again.

“Like a daughter,” I repeated, amazed at his ability to rebrand the past.

“Yes,” he said, voice gaining strength now that he’d found a familiar pitch. “She loved you. It would kill her if you weren’t there to say goodbye.” He laughed, a brittle sound. “Well. You know what I mean.”

“She died,” I said. “Deaths don’t retroactively invent relationships.”

He ignored that. “You can help with the photo boards,” he said. “You were always good with…creative stuff. And the food. The music. We should do a slideshow. I’ve seen funerals online with slideshows. People remember. It’s in four days. Come quickly.”

“The funeral is in four days,” I repeated. “And you’re just now calling me?”

“Yeah, well, I’ve been…busy,” he said. “There’s paperwork. People keep asking me things. I sent a message to your old email. Maybe it went to spam.”

My old email. The one I’d stopped using right after the divorce. The one attached to a life I’d done my best to empty.

“There’s also the…costs,” he added, dropping his voice as if the word might bite him. “Funerals are…very expensive. I didn’t know. The casket, the plots, the—” he inhaled, bracing. “You should…contribute. She would expect that from her daughter.”

It took effort not to laugh. Or scream.

“Just this once,” he said softly, playing a card that might once have worked. “For her. For what we had. Help me. Please.”

Behind me, June giggled. “Mama, look,” she called. “My Lego tower is taller than Daddy!”

“In a second, June Bug,” I called back, keeping my eyes on the kitchen window. It reflected my face—older, sharper, steadier. It also reflected the magnets on the fridge behind me: June’s scribbles, a photo of Dad and Sadie, a “World’s Okayest Mom” magnet Owen had bought as a joke.

“You have a kid?” Mason blurted in my ear, his tone cracking. “Is that a…kid? In your house?”

“Yes,” I said.

“With who?” he demanded, as if there was a chance it might be some cosmic fluke.

“With my husband,” I said. “Owen.”

“You got married again,” he said. “And had a child.” His words sounded like accusations.

“Yes.”

“But… Mom said…” His voice broke on the wrong person. “She swore you were barren. She said you broke your womb with your career. She said—”

“I remember what she said,” I cut in. “She was wrong. About my body. About her power. About a lot of things.”

“Why…why didn’t you—” He swallowed. “You told me you couldn’t have children.”

“I told you the treatments weren’t working,” I said. “I told you our doctor recommended the next steps. You heard what you wanted to hear. Or what she instructed you to hear.”

“I…left you,” he said, the fact landing on him slowly. “Because of…that. And now you’re…” He trailed off, stunned by his own math. “You lied.”

I inhaled, exhaled. “No,” I said. “I never lied. My body is not a vending machine. It didn’t owe you a child on your timeline. You chose to see the absence of a baby as the absence of my value.”

“Still,” he said, grasping. “After everything we had, everything we were…how can you be so cold? My mother is dead.”

My throat tightened—not for Mila, but for Sadie, three years gone. For the ache that still flickered when I smelled cinnamon. For the woman who had earned the title mother-in-law and didn’t get to wield it for long.

“My mother-in-law died three years ago,” I said quietly. “Her name was Sadie. She made the best pie crust I’ve ever tasted and she treated me like a person, not an appliance. The woman you’re burying is your mother, and only yours. You and I…no longer share that word.”

Silence crackled over the line.

“You have no heart,” he whispered.

“That’s not true,” I said. “I just finally stopped lending it to people who treat it like collateral.”

“You won’t even come?” he asked, incredulous. “No flowers? No card? After she…fed you. Gave you a roof.”

“Fed me meals I cooked,” I said. “Gave me a roof she made hell under. No. I will not be there. That chapter ended when she told me never to show my face again. For once, I intend to respect her wishes.”

“You’re ungrateful,” he said.

“You’re grieving,” I corrected. “And looking for someone to do the work. I understand that. But your grief is not a summons. I do not serve it.”

He inhaled like he was winding up for another argument. I cut in.

“I wish you…peace,” I said, surprising myself by meaning it. “That’s all.”

Then I hung up.

My hand shook as I put the phone down. Not from doubt. From adrenaline.

“Mama,” June called. “My castle fell down. Can you help?”

“Yes,” I said, turning away from the counter. “That I can do.”

 

Part 4

You can say you won’t think about someone and still find them in the corners of your mind, especially when you’ve just heard their world tilt.

That night, after we put June to bed, I told Owen about the call.

He listened with his arms crossed and his jaw tight, not interrupting.

“He actually said ‘you were like a daughter to her,’” I said, chopping bell peppers with more force than necessary. “I wanted to ask if he’d ever listened to the way she talked to me. To anyone.”

“He’s rewriting,” Owen said. “People love a revisionist history—especially when the original makes them look bad.”

“I shouldn’t care,” I said. “It’s been ten years. Why is this rattling me?”

“Because grief is messy,” he said. “And so is trauma. You don’t owe him anything. But you’re human.”

“I told him my mother-in-law died three years ago,” I said. “I thought the line would feel…petty. It just felt…true.”

He smiled. “It was a good line,” he said. “You stayed on your side of the fence.”

“Do you think I was too harsh?” I asked.

He took the knife from my hand, set it down, and folded me into a hug that smelled like laundry detergent and garlic.

“I think you were honest,” he said. “You didn’t call him names. You didn’t gloat. You just refused to step back into a role that nearly hollowed you out. That’s not harsh. That’s healthy.”

The next day, my father came by with a bag of groceries.

“Heard you got a call from the ghost of marriages past,” he said, setting oranges and coffee on the counter. “Want me to pretend my hearing’s gone when he shows up at my shop asking where you live?”

“You two get updates faster than my group chat,” I said. “Did you talk to him?”

“He called the shop looking for sympathy,” Dad said. “Said, ‘Your daughter won’t help me bury Mom.’ I said, ‘She doesn’t help me with oil changes either, and I don’t hold it against her.’”

I laughed. “What did he say?”

“He hung up,” Dad shrugged. “Good riddance. Kid needs to learn grief isn’t a hall pass for bad behavior.”

He put a carton of Sadie’s favorite tea on the table—another brand, same flavor. The absence still pricked.

“I feel…strange,” I admitted. “Like I should feel more guilty. Or more triumphant. I don’t.”

“You did your mourning already,” he said gently. “For the mother-in-law you lost three years ago and for the mother you never had. You don’t owe any tears to the woman who called my daughter barren at my granddaughter’s potential expense.”

I stirred coffee and stared out the window.

“Do you think she meant it?” I asked. “When she said those things? Or was she just…angry?”

“Both,” Dad said. “But intention doesn’t fix impact. She poked your deepest wound and then blamed you for bleeding. That’s not something you forget just because someone stopped breathing.”

Two days later, I saw a post on Facebook. Someone had tagged me in a photo—an old mutual friend from that previous life, the kind of person who keeps everyone on the same digital Christmas card list.

The photo: a casket, closed, draped in white flowers. Behind it, a portrait of Mila smiling in a way I’d never seen in person. Beside it, Mason, thinner, paler, looking like a man who’d been handed the bill for something he thought was prepaid.

Underneath: Saying goodbye is hard. She was complicated, but she was mine. Funeral details in comments if you knew her.

I hovered over the “like” button. Didn’t click it. There was nothing to like.

I clicked the comments instead. A few “so sorry for your loss,” a couple of “sending love,” one surprisingly blunt “may her memory be a blessing and a warning.”

I closed the app.

Later that week, I ran into a woman named Iris at the grocery store, near the freezer section.

“Leah?” she said, pushing her cart around the corner. “Oh my God. I haven’t seen you in forever.”

Iris had been a neighbor on Mila’s street. She’d seen more than I’d realized back then.

“Hey,” I said. “How are you?”

She shrugged. “Same old,” she said. “Except for the Stones saga. Heard he called you.”

Word traveled.

“Briefly,” I said.

“Funeral was…something,” she said, eyes flicking toward the glass doors of the freezer as if the peas might be listening. “Small. His new wife didn’t look happy.”

“New wife?” I asked.

“Oh yeah,” she said. “Didn’t you know? He remarried to a woman twenty years younger. Real pretty. Real…quiet. Mila didn’t like her. Too independent, she said. Too many opinions.” Iris smirked. “Guess we know who won that tug-of-war.”

“Does she have kids?” I asked, feeling a prickle.

“Not yet,” she said. “Mila kept complaining about that at bridge. ‘What’s the point of a wife who won’t give you a baby,’ she’d say. I told her to be grateful she had someone cooking for her, but you know her. Nothing was ever enough.”

My stomach turned.

“You think he’s repeating the pattern?” I asked.

Iris shrugged. “Men like that don’t change unless something big shakes them,” she said. “Maybe this will. Or maybe in ten years I’ll be running into that poor girl in this same aisle while she buys herself ice cream and wonders what went wrong.”

It had never occurred to me that I might not be the last woman he tried this with. Intellectually, I knew people re-offend. Emotionally, I’d wanted my story to be unique in its awfulness.

“Does she…have anyone?” I asked. “Family?”

“Her parents live out of state,” Iris said. “She works at the salon on Fifth. Nice girl. Too nice.”

I stared at the bags of frozen vegetables in front of me, the future of another woman’s sanity stacked behind the glass.

“You okay?” Iris asked.

“Yeah,” I lied. “Just…thinking.”

That night, I told Owen and Dad about Iris, the new wife, the almost certainly ongoing cycle.

“You want to…reach out to her?” Owen asked cautiously.

“Part of me does,” I said. “Part of me wants to show up with a PowerPoint called ‘Red Flags And How To Run When You See Them.’ But another part of me knows she might not be ready. Or might not believe me.”

“Like you wouldn’t have believed someone ten years ago if they’d shown up with that for you,” Dad said.

“Exactly,” I said. “I would’ve thought they ‘didn’t understand him.’”

We left it there—for the moment.

 

Part 5

It was a fluke that June and I ended up in the salon on Fifth two months later.

My usual place was booked. June’s hair had reached that length where it got in her eyes no matter how many barrettes I used. She insisted on “a big girl trim.” The salon with the neon scissors sign had space for a walk-in.

The bell jingled as we stepped inside. The air smelled like hairspray and coffee. Pop music played low. A woman in her early thirties stood at the reception desk, flipping through a planner.

She looked up. Our eyes met.

She went pale.

“Hi,” she said, voice steadier than her hands. “Welcome. Do you have an appointment?”

“No,” I said. “We were hoping for a trim. For her.” I rested my hand on June’s shoulder.

“Cute,” June said, grinning. “Not short.”

The woman smiled at her. It reached her eyes, but there was a tiredness there I recognized.

“We can do that,” she said. “I’m Ivy.”

Of course her name was Ivy.

She led June to the chair, draped a cape over her, and started asking her questions about school, cartoons, favorite colors. June chattered happily. I sat in the chair nearby, flipping through a magazine without seeing it.

At one point, when June was engrossed in a story about a squirrel at recess, Ivy glanced at me in the mirror.

“You’re Leah,” she said quietly.

The magazine slid in my lap. “Yes,” I said. “I am.”

“I’m…Ivy Stones,” she said. “Soon to be…something else.”

My chest constricted.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t—”

“It’s okay,” she said quickly. “Small town. Long stories. People talk.”

She trimmed a curl carefully. “He…told me a lot about you,” she added. “And his mother.”

“I’m sure,” I said.

“He told me you were…broken,” she said, lips twisting. “That you resented her. That you…drove a wedge.”

“And what did you think?” I asked.

“I thought…that was a weird way to talk about an ex-wife,” she said. “But I was…twenty-three. He was…attentive. Charming. He paid for dinners. It felt…nice.” She snipped another curl. “Then I met Mila.”

“How was that?” I asked, though I could guess.

“She told me my shoes were cheap,” Ivy said. “Before she asked my name.” She smiled tightly. “I still wore them.”

“You have good shoes,” June announced from her chair, kicking her sneakers together. “They’re sparkly.”

“Thank you,” Ivy said, eyes softening.

“She called me like a real daughter once,” Ivy added in an undertone. “When she wanted something.”

“She had a way of…adjusting definitions,” I said.

“She left me in the living room once with a full sink after Thanksgiving and said, ‘In this family, daughters clean while men talk.’” Ivy swallowed. “I…washed the dishes. When I asked Mason later if he thought that was…fair, he said, ‘She’s old. Humor her.’”

I could feel the old anger rising, but it wasn’t directed at her.

“I heard you…wouldn’t help with the funeral,” she said, glancing at me in the mirror. “He was furious. Said you were…heartless. Said you’d had a baby and didn’t even tell him.”

“I didn’t help,” I said. “And I didn’t tell him. Either fact felt like an invitation.”

She nodded slowly. “Good,” she said.

We sat with that word for a moment.

“Are you…okay?” I asked carefully.

She hesitated. “Since she died…it’s quieter,” she said. “But I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop. For the next…requirement.”

“You don’t owe anyone your life,” I said softly. “Not even your husband. Especially not a dead woman who tried to live through you.”

She snipped the last curl, fluffed June’s hair, and unclipped the cape. “All done,” she said brightly. “Princess curls intact.”

June hopped down, admired herself, and declared, “I look like Elsa and a scientist,” which is apparently the current ideal for five-year-old girls.

At the register, Ivy totaled the bill.

“On the house,” she said, when I reached for my card.

“I can pay,” I said.

“I know,” she replied. “But consider it a thank you. For…not coming to the funeral. For reminding him the world didn’t revolve around him and his mother.”

I blinked. “He…said that?”

“He realized it,” she said. “Eventually. Somewhere between picking caskets and realizing how much debt she’d hidden. Your absence made him look at a lot of things. He…still tells the story like you’re the villain. But…he’s quieter about it now.”

“I’m not interested in being anyone’s villain,” I said. “Or hero. I just want my life.”

“You seem to have it,” she said, glancing out the windows at Owen’s car, at June skipping ahead.

“I do,” I said.

She looked at me for a long second. “I think I want that too,” she said.

We stepped outside. The air smelled like rain.

“If you ever need to…talk,” I said, handing her a card with only my first name and phone number on it, “about anything, not just him…call. I won’t tell you what to do. I’ll just…listen.”

She took it. “Thank you,” she said. “I might.”

Driving home, June chattered about her hair. Owen asked how it went. Dad called to ask if we were still on for Sunday dinner. Sadie’s recipe sat on the fridge, curling at the corners, a looping reminder.

My ex-husband’s mother had died. He’d called, expecting me to slip back into the role I’d once played with bleeding feet and a fake smile.

Instead, I stayed where I was.

My mother-in-law died three years ago—with flour on her hands and a joke on her lips and my name in her blessing. She left me a pantry of recipes and a template for how to love people without consuming them.

Every time I bake one of her pies, I think about that. About how dying doesn’t make anyone better than they were when they breathed; it just makes their choices permanent. About how grief doesn’t entitle anyone to resurrect ghosts from the lives they wrecked.

I think about my father’s leaky tap and the way he showed me I didn’t need to call a plumber for every drip. I think about how some systems can be fixed and some need to be replaced entirely.

And I think, as I roll dough and pinch edges, about the woman I used to be—the one who folded towels in a house where no one said thank you and thought that was what marriage was. I tell her, silently, that she did her best with what she knew. That she eventually learned to hang up the phone when the past called.

That she is forgiven.

That she is loved.

That she was never barren—only planted in the wrong soil.

Now, when an unknown number pops up on my phone, I glance at it, smile, and decide.

If it’s work, I answer.

If it’s my father, I answer.

If it’s Owen, I answer before it finishes the first ring.

If it’s Mason, I don’t.

I already wrote my last line in that story.

“My mother-in-law died three years ago.”

Everything after that belongs to me.

THE END!

Disclaimer: Our stories are inspired by real-life events but are carefully rewritten for entertainment. Any resemblance to actual people or situations is purely coincidental.