Fifteen Years After My Divorce, I Found My Ex-Mother-in-Law Digging Through a Dumpster

Then she cried.

Not the quiet, polite kind of crying. The kind that shakes your chest and makes you press your hand to your mouth because you can’t control it.

“Oh God,” she said. “Oh God, no.”

She reached for my hands like she was afraid I’d disappear.

I tried to comfort her, which felt backward and strange.

There I was, the one who’d been wronged, the one whose life was falling apart, and I was patting her shoulder and telling her it wasn’t her fault.

At the courthouse, she stood beside me instead of him.

Think about that for a second. Her own son, and she stood with me.

When the papers were signed, when it was official and done and over, Dorothy hugged me on the steps outside.

“You deserved better,” she said.

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