Aethelgard's Divorce

printed them at a 24-hour copy shop, the cheap fluorescent lights making my skin look pale and sick. The clerk didn't even look at

en a story no one cared about, least of a

lling revolutionary. I had spent six months planning the event, coordinating with vendors, managing the guest list, and ensuring every single detail was perfect so that Liam, with his crippling social anxiety, could naviga

for the whole world. I stood in the wings, my heart swelling with a complicated mix of pride and exhaustion. He started his

ballroom, "I have to thank the one person who truly understands

signer, a free-spirited artist with paint perpetually under her fingernails and a laugh tha

ed in that single moment. He didn't just forget me, he replaced me. He held up Olivia as the woman who mattered, while I, his wife, was nothing more than a part of the hired help. People who knew o

e phrase was too clean, too simple for the mess of our life. It didn't capture the ache of being invisible, the slow erosion of my own

s made. I need

transient reality of my childhood. My parents died in a car crash when I was eight. I had no other family. The social

ickly, to not get too attached to a bedroom or a family pet. I was always the new girl, the outsider, the charity case. I le

small and always smelled of stale cigarette smoke and boiled cabbage. Their own son, a boy two years my senior, saw me as an intrusion. He would

itted to a high school competition. It was a small, laminated certificate and a fifty-d

ar," she said, before turning back to the televisi

an architect, of building beautiful, permanent things, felt foolish in a life where nothing was permanent. That night, I realized that

in the Hayes mansion. She heard that the family patriarch, the formidable Mr. Hayes Sr., was looking for a very specific kind of wife fo

I was a blank slate, a perfect candidate. I was not being chosen for love or companionship. I was being hired for a job, the most important job of my life