When Greta is told to serve dinner and disappear during her husband’s big work dinner, something inside her shifts. After years of silence, she’s ready to reclaim her voice, one carefully timed sentence at a time. In a house where she’s treated like wallpaper, Greta decides it’s time to peel herself off.
The spoon I was drying slipped from my hand the moment my husband, Everett, or Rett as he demanded to be called, walked in. “Greta, you didn’t forget about tomorrow, did you?” Rett barged into the kitchen, yanking off his tie like it had somehow insulted him. “I remember,” I said calmly, looking over my shoulder.
“What time are they coming?”
“Seven. And it’d be better if you just set the table and stayed in our room. This is a business meeting, Greta.
It’s important.”
There was a hum at the back of my skull, a low, heavy frequency like an old radio tuning to something sharp. “I’m the lady of the house, Rett,” I said. My voice wasn’t angry, just… factual.
My husband scoffed and gave a humorless laugh, still walking past me. “Come on, Greta. Lady of the house?
Just make the place look nice, serve the food, and stay out of the way, okay? I need this to go smoothly.”
And then, as if he hadn’t just slashed through whatever dignity remained between us, he muttered something about the wine not being chilled and disappeared into the bedroom. I stood there for a long time, staring at my reflection in the kitchen window.
Not at my face but at the background behind me, the softness of the curtains I sewed last winter, the orchid I kept alive despite everything, and the table I re-varnished with my own hands. This was my home. And somehow, I’d been turned into furniture.
Rett and I had been married for 12 years. In that time, I had moved twice for his career, leaving behind the familiar streets of my hometown and the clients I had worked years to build relationships with. I gave up my graphic design studio, a space that once smelled like ambition and eucalyptus oil, all because Rett said that the timing wasn’t right.
“I need to be in a different state, Greta. I need the big fish to bite. We’re not going to get far here,” he’d said.
I helped edit his pitch decks when he couldn’t frame a sentence, even though he never credited me for anything. I hosted dinner after dinner with a smile stretched thin by exhaustion, always playing the perfect partner so he could “build connections.”
But the truth was simple. He hadn’t really seen me in years.
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
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