Love shouldn’t have a price tag, but try telling that to my ex-fiancé’s family. After my grandmother’s death left me an inheritance, Jake’s mother Denise handed me a typed list of required purchases – from luxury watches to monthly cash payments – to “prove” I deserved to marry her son.
I’ll never forget sitting at that dinner table, fake-smiling while reading demands that would drain nearly a quarter of my inheritance. Or Jake’s shrug when I begged him to intervene later. “That’s just Mom being Mom,” he said, as if extortion was an endearing quirk.
So I gave them exactly what they’d asked for – in the most literal way possible. The look on Denise’s face when she opened her “Cartier bracelet” (plastic, from the dollar store) was almost worth the pain of packing up three years of my life.
Now I’m building a future my grandmother would be proud of, while Jake’s family learns the hard way that some things – like respect and basic human decency – can’t be bought at any price.
