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his face arranged in an expression I’d never seen before. Not anger exactly, but something colder. Indifference mixed with disgust, like I’d become something distasteful he needed to dispose of.
Behind him, I could see Marissa hovering in the hallway, my daughter-in-law, her face carefully neutral. She’d orchestrated this, I knew. The past six months of subtle suggestions, the comments about how I was “slowing them down,” the way she’d started referring to my bedroom as “the office we need.” I’d seen it coming but refused to believe my own son would choose her manipulation over thirty years of me raising him alone after his father died.
“Paul, please,” I tried one more time, my voice breaking despite my determination to maintain dignity. “Can’t we just talk about this? I have nowhere to go. It’s pouring rain.”
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