I looked down at the soup pot, then up at Bianca’s smug, vicious face. She thought she had won. She thought I was a defeated old woman.
“You’re right, Bianca,” I said, my voice eerily calm. “It’s time to make a change.”
I gripped the heavy, cast-iron Dutch oven. Five minutes later, a loud, deafening crash shook the entire foundation of the house.
Part 2
The sound was like a bomb going off. Caleb came sprinting into the kitchen, his face pale, and instantly froze.
The massive, custom-built Italian glass display case—the one Bianca had forced me to pay for under the guise of “home improvement”—lay in thousands of jagged shards on the floor. I had lifted the heavy cast-iron Dutch oven and hurled it directly through the glass. Thick, boiling tomato soup was now dripping down Bianca’s prized collection of designer handbags and diamond-encrusted jewelry.
“What did you do?!” Bianca screamed, her eyes wide with pure horror as she stared at her ruined treasures. “My Birkins! My jewelry! You insane old hag!”
Caleb grabbed my arm, his grip tight and frantic. “Mom, are you out of your mind? Do you have any idea how much those cost? I’ve tolerated your presence here, but this is destruction of property! You’re going to pay for every single cent of this!”
I slowly pulled my arm out of his grasp, staring directly into my son’s eyes. “I won’t pay a dime, Caleb. In fact, neither will you.”
“That’s it!” Bianca shrieked, grabbing her phone. “I’m calling the police. I’m getting her thrown in a cell, and then we are putting her in the cheapest, most miserable nursing home in the state!”
“Go ahead, call them,” I replied, my voice dangerously steady. I pulled a linen napkin from the counter, calmly wiped the blood from my forehead, and walked up to my room without looking back.
Over the next forty-eight hours, the house felt like a war zone. Bianca and Caleb stopped speaking to me, acting as though they had already won. They spent their evenings whispering about which facility to ship me to. They were smug, completely convinced that my outburst was the final nail in my coffin. Bianca even went so far as to pack my clothes into cheap garbage bags and leave them by the front door.
