“Your mother has passed, and crying won’t change that—so wipe your face, prepare dinner, and don’t look like a mourning child when my guests show up,” my husband told me only two hours after I returned

But today, because Mark had trampled on my mother’s honor, the truth had to come out. Mark shook his head violently, refusing to believe it. He screamed hysterically that it was impossible, that he had invested a lot of money in this house, but his shouts were useless. The legal proof was right before his eyes. He was nothing but a freeloader who didn’t know his place. He had lived in the house of the mother-in-law he insulted. He had eaten with the money of the mother-in-law he belittled, and now he was trying to kick out the owner’s own daughter. Mr. Harrison looked at Mark with manifest disgust. He said in a booming voice that Mark didn’t have a single inch of right to this land, and since Mrs. Vance had bequeathed all her assets to me, the sole owner of this house was now me.

With absolute power in my hands, I pointed to the front door, which was wide open. The night wind was beginning to bring a gust of cold air, as if signaling to take out the trash quickly. I said the word I had wanted to say for so long. “Get out.” The word left my mouth lightly, but with a devastating weight for Mark. I didn’t shout. I spoke with the firmness of a queen giving an order in her own domain. I told Mark and Jessica to get out of my house immediately.

I never wanted to see their faces again. I didn’t want the air of the house my mother had left me to be further contaminated by their breath. Mark tried to resist. He stood up and tried to grab my hand—perhaps to plead or to threaten, I don’t know. But before his dirty fingers could touch my skin, Mr. Harrison’s two bodyguards moved swiftly, grabbing both his arms, twisting them behind his back, and restraining him forcefully. Mark thrashed like a madman, shouting and insulting me, calling me an ungrateful wife, but his screams only sounded like the barking of a trapped dog. The bodyguards dragged Mark by force towards the exit.

Mark’s shoes squeaked as they scraped against the tile floor that I had mopped with tears that very afternoon. This time, that floor was a silent witness to the expulsion of the parasite that had been eating away at my happiness. Seeing Mark being dragged away, Jessica tried to take the opportunity to slip away, but I wouldn’t let her escape so easily. I called her name loudly. Jessica froze, her body tensed. I ordered the bodyguard to make sure Jessica also went out the door of my house and that she took nothing but the clothes on her back. The handbag, phone, and jewelry bought with fraudulent money had already been confiscated.

Jessica looked at me with pleading eyes, but I turned away. She had to feel what it was like to have nothing. Just as she had tried to trample on my dignity earlier, Mark and Jessica were pushed out the front door, stumbling onto the front yard. The sky, which had been holding back, finally broke. The rain began to pour down in sheets. Not a drizzle, but a deluge that soaked them in an instant. The rainwater mixed with Mark’s tears. He got up, drenched. His hair, once neatly styled, now hung limply over his forehead. He ran back to the porch, banging on the glass door that the bodyguards had locked from the inside.

He screamed my name, begging for forgiveness, saying he had nowhere to go. He said his wallet was left inside, and he didn’t have a single dollar in his pocket because I had told the bodyguard not to give it to him. I stood behind the large living room window, watching the scene outside with an empty heart. The porch light illuminated Mark’s pathetic figure. He pounded on the glass, his face pressed against it, distorted by the streams of rain. He looked like a ghost from the past, trying to haunt me. But this glass now separated us. Behind Mark, Jessica stood shivering from the cold. Her mascara had run, staining her cheeks and making her look like a weeping clown.