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be married to you. I’m divorcing you.” There, he’d said it, and it felt good. Damn good.
    Harriet threw her head back and laughed. “We’ll just see about that. There will be no divorce in this family.” Her voice was so cold it could have frozen ice cream.
    John stood his ground. “That’s what you think. And when a judge hears how you’ve neglected and mistreated Abby, there won’t be any contest about who gets custody of her. I’ll have so many witnesses testify on my behalf, your hair will turn gray.” He swept his arm in front of him. “You can have this house along with the mortgage payments. You can have both cars with both car payments. You can have all the maxed-out credit cards. In short, Harriet, you are going to have to get off that skinny, regal ass of yours,” John said, parroting Donovan’s words, “and get a job to support yourself and your fairy princess of a daughter.”
    Harriet waved her beautifully manicured hand in dismissal. “This is absurd, John. We’ve had our ups and downs, but things haven’t been that bad.” Her eyes narrowed in suspicion. “This is that bastard Donovan’s doing, isn’t it?”
    John felt his insides return to normal. “This has nothing to do with Donovan. I’ve been thinking about divorce for a long time.”
    “Stop talking like a lunatic, John. This is all because of that crazy Donovan. My sister must have been insane to marry him. He was happy when she died so he could collect her insurance. He preys on women. I’ve seen the parade of women who go in and out of his house. He has a different one for every day of the week. If he was a woman, I’d call him a slut.”
    “He doesn’t have a very high opinion of you either, Harriet.”
    “So you want a divorce,” she said, walking away from him. “You’ll have to pay alimony and child support, you know.”
    “We’ll let the judge decide what’s right.” Now that he’d gotten past telling her, he felt more confident.
    “I know what you’re doing. You’re trying to get even with me for not taking Abby to the play. We’ve been down this road before, and I have no intention of traveling it again. It’s late. You have to get up early to go to work.”
    “There’s no work tomorrow, Harriet. The site is waterlogged.” He picked up the stack of bills he’d been sorting through earlier and jammed them into her hands. “You might as well take these because I’m not paying them. They are now officially all yours.”
    John saw naked fear in his wife’s eyes and knew he finally had her attention. A smile tugged at the corners of his mouth. He waited for what Donovan said would come next. It came sooner than he expected.
    “Be reasonable, John. Let me get you a cup of hot chocolate and let’s sit down and talk about what’s troubling you.”
    “No thanks, Harriet. I’m not in the mood for hot chocolate or any other food or drink.”
    Harriet unbuttoned the first two buttons of her robe. “All right then. Let’s just go to bed, John. It’s so much easier to talk in a relaxed atmosphere.”
    “Relaxed atmosphere? You mean seductive atmosphere, don’t you? I don’t think so, Harriet. Whatever feeling I had for you died a long time ago.” He straightened his shoulders. “This is the way it is now, Harriet. I’m leaving you. That’s the bottom line, so you better start getting used to it.”
    “You’re just going to throw it all away? Just like that!”
    It was his turn to laugh. “Throw what away? We don’t have anything to throw away. All we have are bills,” he said, flipping the paper edges with his finger.
    “Go to hell, John Evans!” Harriet shouted, as her high-heeledmules slapped the tile floor in her haste to get out of the kitchen.
    “Right again, Donovan,” John said, his fist shooting in the air.
    Donovan Mitchell stared across the yard. “John, John, why did you marry that bitch? I tried to warn you. Now look where it’s gotten us.”
    He was glad he had said it