My sister-in-law slid into our sixteenth-anniversary dinner booth, wedged herself between me and the wall in sweaty yoga pants, and reached for the bread basket as if she were invited.
For years, my marriage had a third wheel. Our private moments were never truly private, each one hijacked by a surprise appearance or a manufactured crisis.
My husband, her brother, was her willing accomplice. He always defended her with a sad story about her divorce and her loneliness, a defense that painted my desire for privacy as cruelty.
I tried being nice. I tried setting boundaries. I even tried creating elaborate, secret plans to get one night alone with the man I married.
What she didn’t count on was that this time, her final power play would end not with an argument, but with a devastatingly public eviction, an unexpected round of applause from a room full of strangers, and a table finally set for two.
The Unspoken Reservation
It starts with a vibration. A low hum against the granite countertop where I’d left my phone. I didn’t have to look. I knew the specific, anxious buzz of a text from my sister-in-law, Chloe. It was different from the cheerful chirp of my son’s school updates or the solid, reliable thrum of a message from my husband, Mark. Chloe’s texts felt like a warning siren for a storm you knew was coming but kept hoping would veer off course.
Mark was in the shower, the sound of water drumming against tile a temporary shield. We were supposed to be leaving in thirty minutes for Rossi’s, a little Italian place we hadn’t been to in years. It was our spot, the place where he’d fumbled through a proposal with a ring box upside down. Tonight was just a regular Tuesday, but I was trying. Lord, was I trying. As a project manager, my entire life was about structuring chaos into a predictable, successful outcome. My marriage felt like my one project that was perpetually behind schedule and over budget.
I picked up the phone. The screen glowed with the inevitable. *“Hey you two! Whatcha up to tonight? I’m so bored! LOL.”*
My thumb hovered over the keyboard. My first instinct, the one that screamed from a place of pure, unadulterated self-preservation, was to write, *“Having our weekly colonoscopy. Rain check?”* But I couldn’t. That wasn’t the kind of wife I was. That wasn’t the kind of sister-in-law I was supposed to be. I was the good one, the stable one. Sarah, the reliable project manager.
Instead, I typed, *“Hey! Just a quiet dinner for us tonight.”* I added a smiley face, a tiny yellow lie that felt like swallowing a shard of glass. I was giving her an out. I was clearly, politely, stating the boundary. *Us.* A two-person word.
The three little dots appeared instantly, pulsing like a heartbeat. Mark walked into the kitchen, a towel around his waist, smelling of soap and steam. “Ready to go soon?” he asked, kissing the top of my head. He glanced at my phone. “Chloe?”
I nodded, my stomach tightening. “Just seeing what we were up to.”
The dots vanished. A new text popped up. *“Oh, Rossi’s? I LOVE that place! I haven’t had their gnocchi in forever. I can be ready in 15! Don’t wait for me, I’ll meet you there! :)”*
Another smiley face. She used them like weapons, these cheerful little icons of passive aggression. She hadn’t asked. She hadn’t waited for an invitation. She’d just… inserted herself. It wasn’t a question. It was a declaration. Mark read the text over my shoulder, and I saw the familiar flicker in his eyes—not annoyance, but a soft, misplaced pity. “Oh. Well, I guess she’s at a loose end.”
“Mark,” I started, the word barely a whisper. “It was supposed to be… us.”
He sighed, a sound I knew as well as my own name. It was the sound of him being caught between his wife and his sister. “I know, honey. But she’s just been so lonely since the divorce. It’s just one dinner. What’s the harm?”
The harm was that it was never just one dinner. It was the slow, methodical erosion of our life together, one uninvited gnocchi dinner at a time. The harm was the lie I was now forced to live, pretending that our booth for two had always been meant for three.
A Geometry of Intrusion
The movie theater was dark, the air thick with the smell of buttered popcorn and teenage desperation. Mark and I had been looking forward to this for weeks. It was the finale of a sci-fi trilogy we’d started watching on our third date. It felt symbolic, a full-circle moment. We’d even gotten the good seats, the plush recliners in the back row with the little trays that swung over your lap. For once, I’d managed to keep the plan under wraps. I’d bought the tickets online and simply told him to be ready for a surprise.
We were ten minutes into the previews when a silhouette appeared in the aisle, peering at the glowing seat numbers. The figure was tall and lanky, and the frizzy halo of hair was unmistakable even in the dark. My heart sank into my shoes.
“There you are!” Chloe whispered, her voice a stage whisper that carried through the entire section. “I thought I recognized the back of your head, Marky!”
She squeezed past a couple holding a giant tub of popcorn, murmuring apologies that didn’t sound apologetic at all. Mark shifted in his seat, a combination of surprise and resignation on his face. He’d told her. Of course, he’d told her. I’d said, “Surprise date night,” and he’d likely texted her, *“Sarah’s taking me somewhere secret, probably that new sci-fi flick we wanted to see.”* His inability to maintain a boundary was a special kind of talent.
Chloe plopped into the empty seat directly to Mark’s left, effectively creating a buffer between my husband and me. She’d bought her own ticket, for a seat three rows down, but saw no issue with abandoning it. “What a coincidence!” she chirped, unwrapping a crinkly candy bar. “I was just in the mood for a movie and this was the only thing playing that looked decent.”
The ethical knot in my stomach tightened. Was I a terrible person for wanting to scream? She was his sister. She was family. In the grand narrative of life, being annoyed that your lonely, divorced sister-in-law joined you for a movie seemed petty, cruel even. The world is full of real problems, and this was a luxury complaint. But it felt like death by a thousand paper cuts. Each intrusion was a tiny slice, insignificant on its own, but together they were bleeding me dry.
She leaned across Mark, her candy-bar wrapper crackling like a forest fire. “Did I miss anything good?” she asked me, her breath smelling of artificial cherry.
“Just the part where the main characters get to spend some time alone,” I muttered, my voice lost under the orchestral swell of the final trailer.
Mark either didn’t hear me or chose not to. He just patted my hand, a gesture meant to be placating, and offered Chloe some of our popcorn. She took a huge handful, her fingers brushing against his. In the flickering light of the screen, I wasn’t just a wife on a date with her husband. I was the odd one out, the third point in a bizarre, uncomfortable triangle.
The Anniversary Getaway
For our fifteenth anniversary, I planned a trip. Not a big one. Just a three-day weekend in a cabin two hours away, nestled in the woods by a lake. No cell service. No Wi-Fi. Just a fireplace, two rocking chairs on a porch, and us. I’d booked it six months in advance. I’d arranged for my mom to watch our son, Leo. I’d packed board games and a bottle of wine we’d been saving. I had architected the perfect, impenetrable romantic escape.
The night before we were set to leave, we were packing. Mark was folding sweaters with meticulous care while I was trying to fit a ridiculous number of toiletries into a small bag. That’s when my phone rang. It was Chloe. I let it go to voicemail, a small act of rebellion.
A minute later, Mark’s phone buzzed. He answered it. “Hey, Chlo. What’s up?”
I stopped what I was doing, the silence in the room stretching thin. I could hear her tinny, frantic voice through the receiver. Mark’s face softened with that familiar, frustrating concern. “No, no, it’s not a big deal… Yeah, Sarah’s right here… Hold on.” He held the phone out to me. “Her basement is flooding. The water heater burst. She’s freaking out.”
I took the phone, my dream of a quiet weekend evaporating like mist off the lake we were supposed to see. “Chloe? What’s going on?”
“Oh, Sarah, it’s a nightmare!” she wailed. “There’s water everywhere! I don’t know who to call! The plumber can’t come until tomorrow morning, and I’m scared to stay here alone with all the gurgling noises!”
The hook was in. The bait was set. I knew, with the certainty of a condemned prisoner, what was coming next.
“Could I… I know it’s your anniversary trip and this is the worst timing, but could I just drive up with you guys tonight?” she asked, her voice cracking with manufactured helplessness. “I’ll stay on the couch, I swear! I won’t be any trouble. I just can’t be here alone. I’ll drive back first thing in the morning after the plumber comes.”
Mark was already nodding, his expression screaming, *“We have to, she’s family!”* My meticulously planned escape, our fortress of solitude, was about to be breached. The weekend wasn’t ruined, not entirely. It was worse. It was tainted. Every moment would be filtered through the lens of her presence. The quiet morning coffee on the porch, the late-night talk by the fire, the anniversary toast—it would all have a spectator.
I closed my eyes. “Fine, Chloe,” I said, the word tasting like defeat. “Come over. We’ll wait.” When I hung up, Mark gave me a grateful smile. “Thank you, honey. You’re the best.”
I didn’t feel like the best. I felt like a doormat. A very accommodating, endlessly patient doormat with a packed weekend bag and a heart full of rocks.
The Pity Defense
“We need to talk about Chloe.”
The words came out of me a week after the anniversary-that-wasn’t. We were washing dishes, a domestic détente where difficult conversations sometimes found an opening. Mark didn’t stop scrubbing the lasagna pan, his knuckles white.
“What about her?” he asked, his voice carefully neutral.
“The cabin, Mark. Our anniversary. She didn’t even end up staying the night. The plumber came, she declared the problem ‘manageable,’ and then she hung around for breakfast and half the afternoon, talking about her ex-husband.”
“Her basement really did flood, Sarah. I saw the pictures.”
“I’m not saying she lied about the flood,” I said, my voice rising with a frustration I couldn’t contain. “I’m saying she uses every single crisis, real or imagined, as a ticket into our lives. There’s no lock she can’t pick. There’s no wall she can’t scale. We have no privacy.”
He finally put the pan down and turned to face me, water dripping from his hands onto the floor. “What do you want me to do? She’s my sister. Her husband left her for his dental hygienist, she hates her job, and she has no friends. We’re all she has.”
It was his standard defense, the one he deployed every time. The Pity Defense. It was brilliant in its effectiveness because it immediately painted me as the villain. I was the cold-hearted wife, bullying the poor, lonely divorcée. My needs—our needs—were selfish. Hers were tragic.
“So we’re her emotional support animals?” I shot back. “We’re just supposed to sacrifice our marriage, our time, our sanity, on the altar of Chloe’s loneliness? When does it end, Mark? When she gets a new husband? What if she never does? Is this our life now? The three of us, forever?”
“You’re being dramatic.”
“Am I?” I threw the dish towel on the counter. “Think about it. The movie night. The dinner at Rossi’s. That barbecue at the Hendersons’ that she just ‘happened to be driving by.’ My birthday dinner last year when she brought her own cake because she’s gluten-free and didn’t want to ‘feel left out.’ It never stops.”
He ran a hand through his wet hair, looking cornered. “She doesn’t mean any harm by it. It’s just how she is. She’s… needy.”
“And you’re an enabler,” I said, the words sharper than I intended.
The silence that followed was heavy and cold. He picked up the pan and started scrubbing again, his back to me. The conversation was over. He had retreated to his side of the wall, the side where loyalty to his broken sister outweighed loyalty to his frustrated wife. And I was left on my side, alone, wondering if I was the only one who could see the cracks forming in our foundation.
Operation Fortress of Two
I decided to get tactical. If my husband couldn’t create a boundary, I would build one out of steel and concrete. My new project: a successful, uninterrupted date night. Code name: Operation Fortress of Two.
The plan was simple, elegant, and, I hoped, foolproof. I made a reservation at a new tapas restaurant downtown called Alero. I made it under my maiden name. I told Mark we were going out Friday but gave him no other details. “It’s a surprise,” I said, with a smile that felt more like a grimace.
On Friday, I instructed him to leave his phone at home. “Let’s just disconnect,” I said breezily. “No emails, no texts. Just us.” He grumbled a bit but agreed, tossing his phone onto the bedside table like a surrendered weapon. I silenced my own phone and buried it in the bottom of my purse. Phase one was complete.
Phase two involved logistics. I drove. I took a winding, circuitous route, doubling back once just in case. It felt insane, like I was a spy on a covert mission, but the paranoia was a bitter pill I was willing to swallow. I was high on the possibility of a quiet meal, just the two of us, the way it used to be.
We arrived at Alero. It was perfect. Dimly lit, buzzing with quiet conversation, filled with couples. We were led to a small, secluded booth in the back corner. It was a defensible position. I had a clear line of sight to the door.
“Wow, this place is great,” Mark said, looking at the menu. “How’d you find it?”
“I have my sources,” I said, feeling a genuine smile for the first time all week.
The waiter came, we ordered a bottle of Rioja, and for a glorious twenty minutes, it worked. We talked. We talked about our son Leo’s latest obsession with building impossibly complex Lego spaceships. We talked about a ridiculous email chain from my work. He told me a funny story about his boss. It was normal. It was easy. It was us.
I allowed myself to relax. My shoulders unclenched from their usual position near my ears. I took a sip of wine, the rich, dark fruitiness a balm to my frayed nerves. I had done it. I had outsmarted her. I had engineered a perfect, Chloe-proof evening.
It was a beautiful, fragile illusion, and it was about to be shattered.
The Inevitable Interception
Mark’s hand, which had been resting on mine, suddenly tensed. His eyes flicked towards the entrance, and the relaxed, happy expression on his face dissolved into a familiar look of weary resignation.
“Don’t turn around,” he said, his voice low.
My heart plummeted. It was a useless request. Of course, I turned around.
There she was. Chloe. She was standing at the hostess stand, scanning the room with the intensity of a predator searching for its prey. Her eyes locked on our booth, and a triumphant smile spread across her face. How? How was this possible? I had taken every precaution. It didn’t make any sense.
She waved off the hostess and strode towards us, her heels clicking an ominous rhythm on the terracotta tiles. She was wearing a bright fuchsia top that was impossible to miss. She looked like a highlighter pen come to life.
“Well, hello strangers!” she chirped, sliding into the booth next to Mark before either of us could react. She squeezed in, pushing him closer to me. The intimate space of our booth was instantly cramped and suffocating. “Fancy meeting you here! I was meeting a friend for drinks nearby and she cancelled at the last minute. I was starving, so I just popped in here on a whim. Can you believe the coincidence?”
No, I couldn’t. I didn’t believe in coincidences anymore, not where Chloe was concerned. This was a targeted strike. But how?
She flagged down our waiter with a flick of her wrist. “Could I get a menu, please? And a glass of the Pinot Grigio.” She didn’t ask us; she just ordered. She looked at the small plates of patatas bravas and garlic shrimp that had just arrived. “Ooh, that looks good! I’m stealing one of these.” She speared a shrimp with her fork before I could even process what was happening.
I looked at Mark, my eyes pleading with him to do something, to say something. But he just sat there, a hostage in his own life. He gave a weak, apologetic shrug.
I felt a cold, hard fury begin to build in my chest. This wasn’t just an intrusion anymore. This was a violation. She hadn’t just found us. She had hunted us. And my husband, my partner, the man who was supposed to be on my team, had just let her storm the castle and steal our food. Operation Fortress of Two had failed. The enemy was inside the gates.
The Wisdom of a Ten-Year-Old
The next morning, the failure of the previous night hung in the air like a foul smell. I was making pancakes, moving with a stiff, angry precision, slapping them onto the griddle with more force than necessary. Mark was sitting at the kitchen island, nursing a cup of coffee and scrolling through his phone—which had, of course, magically reappeared from its exile.
Our son, Leo, was meticulously building a Lego tower on the floor. At ten, he had an engineer’s mind and a child’s unfiltered honesty.
“Did you and Dad have fun on your date last night?” he asked, not looking up from his creation.
“It was fine, honey,” I said, my voice tight.
“Did Aunt Chloe have fun, too?”
The spatula clattered from my hand onto the floor. I froze, my back to them both. Mark looked up from his phone, a deer in the headlights. The question was so innocent, so matter-of-fact. Leo wasn’t being sarcastic or pointed. In his mind, it was a perfectly logical question. Date night was a thing his parents did, and Aunt Chloe was a person who was usually at that thing.
The simple, observational question from my son laid the whole pathetic situation bare. Our problem wasn’t a secret. It wasn’t a nuanced, adult conflict. It was so obvious, so normalized, that our ten-year-old had accepted it as a fundamental law of our family’s universe. Parents go on date. Aunt Chloe goes on date. The sky is blue. Water is wet.
I bent down to pick up the spatula, my cheeks burning. I felt a wave of shame so profound it almost buckled my knees. What were we teaching him? That marriage is a three-person spectator sport? That his mother’s comfort and happiness were secondary considerations? That it was normal for a grown woman to be so enmeshed in her brother’s life that she functioned as a permanent, non-optional plus-one?
I stood up and looked at Mark. I didn’t have to say a word. He saw it in my eyes. The hurt, the humiliation, the sheer absurdity of it all reflected back at him from our son’s innocent question.
He finally put his phone down. “Leo,” he said, his voice quiet. “Aunt Chloe wasn’t supposed to be there. It was just supposed to be Mommy and me.”
Leo looked up, his brow furrowed in genuine confusion. “Oh,” he said. “Then why was she there?”
It was the question of the decade. And for the first time, I saw a flicker of something in Mark’s eyes that wasn’t pity for his sister. It was shame.
The Confession
Later that evening, after Leo was in bed, the dam finally broke. I wasn’t yelling. I was past yelling. I was in a state of cold, quiet rage that was far more potent.
“How did she find us, Mark?” I asked, sitting on the edge of the bed while he pretended to be deeply engrossed in organizing his sock drawer.
He didn’t answer at first. He just kept matching black socks with other, slightly different black socks.
“Don’t ignore me,” I said, my voice dangerously calm. “I know you didn’t have your phone. So how did she know where we were?”
He sighed, the sound of total surrender. He sat on the bed next to me, refusing to meet my eyes. “We have a location sharing app on our phones,” he mumbled. “For emergencies. In case one of us gets into an accident or something.”
“We?” I asked. “You mean you and I?”
He shook his head, still staring at the carpet. “Me and Chloe.”
The confession hung in the air between us, ugly and sharp. An app. A digital leash. I had built a fortress, and he had given her the master key. My elaborate plan, my secret reservations, my spy-like driving—it was all a joke. She could track him like a migrating bird.
“Why?” I whispered, the rage now morphing into a deep, aching hurt. “Why would you do that?”
“She insisted,” he said, his voice pleading for understanding. “After her divorce, she got really anxious about being alone. She wanted to know I was okay, and that if she was ever in real trouble, I could find her. It’s a safety thing, Sarah. That’s all.”
“A safety thing she used to ambush our date night,” I said flatly. “You have to see how messed up this is. She’s not your wife. She’s not your child. You are a grown man. You don’t need a GPS tracker for your sister.”
“She must have been worried when I didn’t answer her texts. She probably just checked to make sure I was okay, saw we were at a restaurant, and…”
“And decided her boredom was more important than our marriage,” I finished for him. “This has to stop. I mean it. I cannot live like this anymore. You have to choose. It’s either me, or it’s this… this weird, codependent… thing you have with her. You have to tell her to back off.”
He looked at me, his face a mask of misery. He was trapped, and he knew it. “I’ll talk to her,” he promised, the same words he’d said a dozen times before. “I will. I’ll make it clear.”
But I knew, even as he said it, that his version of “making it clear” and mine were two very different things. His would be a gentle suggestion wrapped in a thousand apologies. Mine was a cease-and-desist order. And I was starting to realize I was going to have to be the one to serve it.
A Fragile Peace
Mark promised he talked to her. He said he called Chloe the next day and had a “real heart-to-heart.” He explained that while we both loved her, we needed our own time, and that our date nights were sacred. According to him, she was “totally understanding” and “a little embarrassed” that she’d overstepped.
For a while, it seemed to have worked. A fragile, tentative peace settled over our lives. Two weeks went by. We went out for pizza and a walk in the park, and my phone remained silent. We stayed in and watched a whole movie without a single, “What are you guys up to?” text. It was bliss. It was a strange, forgotten quiet.
I started to let my guard down. Maybe he’d finally done it. Maybe he’d used the right words, the right tone, and gotten through to her. I felt a surge of affection for him, a gratitude that he’d finally stepped up. The tension that had been a permanent resident in my shoulders began to pack its bags.
“See?” Mark said one evening, as we sat on the couch in comfortable silence, reading. “I told you I’d handle it.”
I leaned my head on his shoulder. “Thank you,” I said, and I meant it. I felt a lightness I hadn’t felt in years. Hope, I realized. That’s what it was. The ridiculous, stubborn, perennial weed of the human heart. I was actually hopeful that we had turned a corner.
We decided to celebrate. It was the five-year anniversary of me closing the deal on the biggest project of my career—a milestone that had secured my promotion to senior project manager. It was a big deal to me. It represented years of late nights, stress-filled presentations, and navigating difficult clients. Mark suggested we go to Vespertine, the kind of fancy downtown restaurant with a wine list thicker than a novel and desserts that involved foam and smoke. It was a true “table for two” kind of place. A place for celebrating a victory that was mine, and by extension, ours. A place where a third wheel would be as welcome as a cockroach in a clean room.
The Calculated Ambush
We were dressed up. Mark in a suit, me in a black dress I hadn’t worn in years. I felt elegant and confident. We left Leo with a babysitter, a rare treat, and the entire evening stretched before us, full of promise. The city lights glittered as we drove downtown. Everything felt right.
We walked into Vespertine. The maître d’ smiled at us. “Good evening. Reservation for two?”
Before Mark could answer, a voice from the bar cut through the quiet murmur of the restaurant. “There they are! I was starting to think you got lost!”
It was Chloe.
She was perched on a barstool, a half-empty glass of white wine in her hand. She was wearing a sequined top that caught the light and threw little flecks of it all over the room. She hopped off the stool and walked towards us, her smile wide and blindingly false.
My blood ran cold. The fragile peace, the hope, the gratitude—it all shattered into a million tiny pieces. This wasn’t a coincidence. This wasn’t a pop-in. This was a premeditated strike.
“Chloe?” Mark said, his voice filled with genuine shock. “What are you doing here?”
“What do you mean?” she said, looping her arm through his. She looked at me, her eyes glinting with something I’d never seen before. It wasn’t loneliness. It was malice. “Mark invited me! He called me yesterday and said you guys were celebrating Sarah’s big work thing and that I should join. He said you’d both missed me the last couple of weeks.” She squeezed his arm. “Wasn’t that sweet of him?”
I turned to look at my husband. His face was pale, his mouth slightly agape. He looked utterly bewildered. He was a terrible liar; I would have known instantly if he was feigning surprise. He was as blindsided as I was.
She had lied. It was a bold, bald-faced lie, designed to do exactly what it was doing: drive a razor-sharp wedge directly between me and Mark. She was framing him as the traitor, making me believe he’d gone behind my back and broken his promise. She was forcing me to either call her a liar in public or accept this new, twisted reality where my husband was actively deceiving me. It was a masterclass in manipulation.
The maître d’ was looking between the three of us, his professional smile faltering. “So… is that a reservation for three?”
Chloe beamed. “It is now!”
I stood there, frozen, the glittering city lights outside seeming to mock me. This wasn’t about loneliness anymore. This was a power play. This was war.
A Friend’s Perspective
“You have got to be kidding me.”
That was the first thing my friend, Jenna, said when I told her the Vespertine story. We were having coffee the next day, and I’d laid out the whole sordid tale, my voice flat and monotone with exhaustion.
“She’s a strategic genius,” I said, swirling the foam in my latte. “A Machiavellian mastermind in a sequined top. She knew exactly what she was doing. She wanted me to think Mark was a liar. She wanted us to fight.”
“And did you?” Jenna asked, her eyes full of concern.
“Of course, we did,” I sighed. “The whole dinner was a nightmare. She dominated the conversation, told embarrassing stories about Mark from high school, and ‘accidentally’ spilled wine on my dress. We fought in the car on the way home. He swore up and down he never invited her, and I believe him. But the damage was done. The whole night was poisoned.”
Jenna reached across the table and put her hand on mine. “Sarah, this is not normal. I know I’ve said it before, but this is next-level crazy. This isn’t a lonely sister-in-law. This is a saboteur.”
Hearing her say it, so plainly and without hesitation, was like a splash of cold water. For years, I had been trying to frame this through a lens of empathy and family duty. I’d told myself I was being uncharitable, that I needed to be more understanding. Mark’s Pity Defense had been so effective that it had infected my own thinking.
“You’re not the bad guy here,” Jenna continued, as if reading my mind. “You are allowed to have a life with your husband. What she is doing is a form of emotional abuse. She’s manipulating both of you, keeping Mark tethered to her with guilt and trying to isolate you by ruining your marriage. You have every right to be furious.”
Her words were a validation I didn’t know I desperately needed. All the rage I had been swallowing, all the frustration I’d been packaging as my own failing, suddenly felt righteous. I wasn’t a bitchy wife. I was a woman defending her territory.
“So what are you going to do?” Jenna asked.
I looked out the window of the coffee shop, watching people walk by, living their normal, Chloe-free lives. For years, I had been playing defense. I’d been reacting, accommodating, and retreating. I’d tried asking nicely. I’d tried being subtle. I’d tried letting my husband handle it. None of it had worked. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do yet,” I said, a new, hard resolve forming in my gut. “But I know what I’m not going to do. I’m not going to do this anymore. It’s over. One way or another.”
About the Author
