Work Text:
You’re surprised when you finally realize it’s over.
The moment doesn’t come when you’re standing in front of the cameras, letting your husband - if he is still your husband after all he’s done to you and your family – grab your cold hand in his clammy one. It doesn’t come when you’re sitting across from him in prison, clasping your hands together so he can’t hold them, listening to him plan his comeback. It doesn’t come when you’re sitting across a polished table with his attorney, learning the part you have to play to get him out of jail and looking across a divide that you know too big to cross yet you still try. It doesn’t come went you’re on the stand, a witness and a victim and still, somehow, to blame, a sleazy lawyer asking you questions about your sex life. Even after all the indignities and all the excuses, you still keep your hands to yourself but don’t move away.
You know what they call you behind your back, a good wife, the good wife. It’s an insult and a commendation and a mantle that you never knew could be so heavy. What does that mean, a good wife? You’re starting to believe it means you can’t be a good anything else. A good wife doesn’t complain when her manipulative mother-in- law sneaks her grandchildren into prison to see their philandering father. A good wife doesn’t listen when women’s right activists label you weak and subjugated beneath a husband’s rule. A good wife doesn’t look at another coworker and wonder what they’d look like outside of suits and court appeals. You realize being a good wife means you can’t be a good person, a good mother, a good friend, a good woman because all your goodness is wrapped up in a man that doesn’t deserve it.
Still, you can’t seem to let it go, that title, that shame, that life. And you wonder if you will ever be over it, either to forget and never forgive or to forgive and walk away forever. You’re caught, trapped and confused in a web you didn’t even know was there. It’s a thousand lies that you never realized you told and a hundred different sights you turned away from. That’s what gets you most of all - you never saw it coming. You believed the bullshit he fed you about honoring each other and the life you’d built together and it was another power play to him.
And then you’re angry and vengeful and you still don’t realize it’s over.
Then it is and you know why.
Surprisingly the reason comes from two pairs of brown eyes. The first belong to your daughter, the one who adored her father so much. You might be able to forgive him for breaking your heart, but how can you forgive him breaking hers? This isn’t falling out of love, another woman, a one-time fling. There are many women and there are prostitutes. And it becomes clear to you that he never had any intention of stopping if he hadn’t been caught. What kind of father is that for a daughter? Or a son?
The second set of brown eyes are deep caramel and spin with hidden depths. Sometimes you think they stare at you with contempt for the position that you are in. You stand by a man that betrayed everything a husband and father is supposed to do. They ask you why you are being a good wife to a man that was never a good husband. Sometimes you think Kalinda knows more about what happened with Peter than you do, and she knows that you are making a mistake but can’t tell you that.
These eyes are mirrors and you don’t like what you see. A weak woman, a neglectful mother, a quietly vindictive life that you’d never be able to escape if you went through with your husband’s plans.
There’s a life to be made here, if it’s over.
There’s a lie to made here, if it’s not.