On my thirtieth birthday, my mother-in-law raised a toast with the words: «To our silly girl from a poor family who lives off our money», and my husband started laughing loudly at that. Then my father stood up from the table and did something that made my mother-in-law freeze in place…

On my thirtieth birthday, my mother-in-law raised a toast with the words, to our silly girl from a poor family who lives off our money, and my husband started laughing loudly at that, then my father stood up from the table and did something that made my mother-in-law freeze in place.

Thirty years old, a milestone that’s usually celebrated in grand style, I didn’t want a noisy party, but Kyle insisted, Paula, come on, it’s an important date, he said, looking at me with his brown eyes, in which golden sparks danced, the very sparks that once made me fall madly in love with him, now looking back, I realize those sparks weren’t a sign of special warmth, but just a play of light, deceptive, like much in our family life.

The morning of my birthday started with hustle and bustle, Kyle booked a banquet hall at the Bellagio restaurant, the most expensive and posh venue in our city, I knew this choice was not so much for me as for his mother, Valerie, a woman who, in eight years of our marriage, never once called me by name to my face, preferring the impersonal «she,» or at best, «our daughter-in-law.»

You can’t imagine how I managed to book this hall, Kyle boasted as we drove to the restaurant to discuss the menu, people queue up six months in advance, but I pulled some strings, and there you go. What strings he pulled, I knew perfectly well, the restaurant owner was an old acquaintance of his father, Victor, a major businessman who held half the construction business in the state in his hands, a man whose name was uttered with awe by anyone even slightly connected to real estate and investments. My father-in-law, unlike his wife, always treated me neutrally, not warmly, but without open hostility.

He was too busy with his affairs to pay attention to women’s squabbles, as he called them. In his understanding, marrying off his son was just another checkmark in the list of necessary life stages, continuing the lineage, creating the right image of a family man, that’s what mattered, and who exactly became the wife was secondary, as long as this woman didn’t interfere and knew her place. The place assigned to me in the Harrington family was very clearly defined from the first day – a silent companion, grateful for the honor bestowed, a girl from humble origins who was incredibly lucky to enter high society.

My own family was ordinary, working-class, my father an engineer at a factory, my mother a elementary school teacher, we never lived luxuriously, but we didn’t struggle either, my parents gave me the main things: education and the understanding that a person’s dignity isn’t measured by the thickness of their wallet. My father, Nicholas, disliked the Harrington family from the first meeting, Paula, they look at people like commodities, he said as we drove home after the first introduction to Kyle’s parents, everything is measured in money for them, even love. I brushed it off then, youth, infatuation, the desire to believe in the best, all that overshadowed the obvious red flags.

Besides, Kyle himself seemed different, not like his parents, more open, sincere, modern. We met at university, I was studying journalism, he economics, we met at an inter-faculty conference where I came as a representative of the student newspaper, and he as a participant with a presentation on new economic trends. I remember how he stood confidently on stage, juggling complex terms and statistics, and I looked up at him, literally and figuratively, thinking I’d never met such a smart and handsome guy.

After the conference, he approached me himself. You listened so attentively, he said with a smile, wrote down everything, even more than needed, I answered honestly, showing my notebook filled from top to bottom. Kyle invited me to a cafe, then again, and again.

Our romance developed rapidly, just six months later he introduced me to his parents, three months after that he proposed, and two months later we got married. The wedding is a separate story, Valerie took the organization of the celebration into her own hands, turning it into a demonstration of the Harrington family’s status, 400 guests, most of whom I saw for the first time in my life. The banquet hall of a five-star hotel, decorated with live orchids specially flown in from Thailand..