George preferred blue. I loved green, so we chose teal.
He wanted modern. I liked traditional, so we settled on transitional styles.
Now I could finally paint the kitchen the soft sage green I’d always wanted.
I could replace the heavy drapes in the living room with the light, gauzy curtains that George had vetoed as too feminine.
Thomas helped me move furniture and paint walls on weekends.
Sometimes Emma and Jack joined us, turning household chores into family projects.
The house began to transform, not into something unrecognizable, but into a warmer, lighter version of itself.
“Dad would have hated these curtains,” Thomas joked one afternoon as we hung the new window treatments in the living room.
“Your father was a wonderful man with terrible taste,” I replied, making him laugh.
The divorce proceedings between Thomas and Violet had turned ugly, as expected.
She fought for everything she could claim, and invented grievances where none existed.
But the prenuptual agreement George had insisted upon when they married, another act of foresight from my practical husband, limited what she could take.
“The judge saw right through her,” Thomas told me after a particularly contentious court hearing. “She tried to claim I was abusive, that I’d kept her from advancing in her career, but she couldn’t produce a single witness to back up her stories.”
I wasn’t surprised.
Violet had always operated through manipulation and lies, maintaining a careful facade that only those closest to her could see through.
Without Thomas to shield her, that facade was crumbling.
One afternoon, I was in the garden planting tulip bulbs for next spring when a familiar car pulled into the driveway.
Violet stepped out, looking as polished as ever in a tailored suit. Her blonde hair swept into a perfect shiny.
I straightened up, wiping my hands on my gardening apron.
“Violet, this is unexpected.”
She approached cautiously, stopping several feet away.
“Ellen, you’re looking well.”
“Thank you,” I replied, waiting for her to reveal the purpose of her visit.
“I suppose you’re enjoying all this,” she said, gesturing vaguely toward the house. “Playing the victim, turning Thomas against me, taking everything that should have been ours.”
“I never wanted any of this, Violet. All I ever wanted was to be treated with respect and included in my family’s life.”
She scoffed.
“Always so righteous, so perfect. Ellen Montgomery, the saintly widow who never does anything wrong.”
I sighed, suddenly feeling too tired for this conversation.
“What do you want, Violet?”
“I want what’s mine. Thomas is being completely unreasonable about the division of assets. I deserve half of everything, including this house.”
“This house was never yours to claim,” I reminded her. “It belonged to George and me. Now it belongs to me alone.”
“I lived here, too,” she snapped. “I helped renovate the kitchen. I chose the new carpeting upstairs.”
“You did those things without consulting me,” I interrupted. “You made changes to my home as if I weren’t there, as if my opinions didn’t matter.”
Violet’s perfectly composed expression faltered for a moment.
“You were always in the way. Always the saded mother-in-law making Thomas feel guilty for not visiting enough, for not calling enough.”
“Is that really how you saw me?” I asked, genuinely curious. “As some manipulative old woman trying to steal your husband’s attention?”
“What else was I supposed to think? You were always there with your stories about Thomas as a child, your little inside jokes with George. You had decades with them before I came along. What was left for me?”
For the first time, I glimpsed something real beneath Violet’s calculated exterior, insecurity, perhaps even fear.
She had always seen me as competition rather than family.
“Marriage isn’t a competition, Violet. Love isn’t a limited resource that runs out if you share it too widely.”
She looked away, blinking rapidly.
“Easy for you to say. You had George wrapped around your finger for 45 years.”
“I had a partnership with George. We respected each other, supported each other. That’s what made our marriage work.”
Violet was silent for a long moment.
Then, squaring her shoulders, she seemed to remember why she’d come.
“I want $50,000 to drop my claim to the vacation property at the lake. Otherwise, I’ll drag this out in court for years.”