"You had the nerve to come here and meet me after what you did, Michael Sullivan,"
Gretchen said with a scoff after her husband took a seat opposite her.
Mike let out a tired sigh. "I don't have time for this, Gretchen. Give me the body."
Gretchen laughed, pitched, bitter, and wrong.
"You? Having no time to spare? With your hundreds of hours to waste on scheming per day? Stop joking, Mike."
Mike stayed silent for a moment, just studying her, and to his dismay, Gretchen looked really good. Like queen-on-her-throne good.
In her simple floral knee-length off-shoulder dress, with her hair in a messy bun and light makeup on, she looked far too radiant for a woman he had tried so hard to destroy.
Gretchen continued after her laughter died down a little.
"You knew I didn't want to be a mother, but that meant shit to you, did it?"
Mike looked at her sharply. "What nonsense are you...?"
Gretchen continued instead, her voice calm and confident, like she was delivering the national news.
"You had time to swap my contraceptive pills with vitamins back then, and you can't wait for me to allow you to bury a stranger in our son's name?"
She chuckled slightly. "You had time to plant evidence that I was abusive to my son, to the point where even I believed it. Yet you claim to be too busy playing 'loving father'?"
She wasn't done, and he knew it, even when she paused to admire the straw in her juice glass.
"You had time to make sure there was no communication between us."
Gretchen laughed again, not believing her own naivety in it all. She was neither blind nor stupid, but she still got played.
"You even replaced me with 'a Gretchen' for the public eye, so nobody would question why they never saw your wife with you."
Mike's jaw tightened, but he said nothing. He was annoyed.
"Oh, and the cherry on top…?" Gretchen added, amused. "Faking my boy's death and having the audacity to call me after four years of isolation… just to tell me that he choked on bread and died?"
If Mike expected her to make a scene that day, then he had better rethink his entire plan with his paparazzi crowd outside.
Gretchen simply relaxed into her chair, regarding her husband coolly, a sweet smile on her face and a "come-on" expression in place.
"How can you sell yourself short like that? You have all the damn time in the world. And then some."
Mike looked around the restaurant once more, and when he realized they were still the only people there, he leaned closer.
She smiled sweetly at him, batting her eyelashes.
"Listen here," he began through gritted teeth. "Ethan is my son too. And his sole guardian in the eyes of the law."
Gretchen stared at him blankly.
"Oh wait, which law is it? The one that proved I was unfit to take care of him at sixteen for the things I did in my postpartum depression period? Or the one that accepted your bribes and locked me away in the asylum without a doctor's permit?"
Mike shook his head sadly.
"You're still not well, Gretchen."
"Whoa!" Gretchen said, mock-shivering dramatically as she widened her eyes at him. "Chills, Mike."
Then she held up her left hand.
"Goosebumps everywhere…"
Mike frowned, surprised and hurt.
"You're not wearing your wedding ring. Why?"
Gretchen gasped dramatically, as if only just realizing it. "Oh my God."
She turned to him.
"Did I tell you that I'm divorced now?" Then her face brightened into a broad smile.
"Who would have thought that I needed to be crazy to finally feel sane?"
Mike's face twisted with conflicting emotions.
"Gretchen…" His voice came out weak, almost pleading, but Gretchen had had enough of one man for a lifetime.
She handed him the autopsy results in an envelope.
"Turns out that person died from cancer and had a vagina underneath the suit. How much did you pay someone to perform surgery on a dead person?"
Mike didn't look at her.
"She wasn't dead at the time. And we had an agreement."
Gretchen nodded as if he were making perfect sense. "Contracts. That's where you excel at."
Then she snorted.
"I just didn't think you'd go as far as using a stage four cancer patient to undergo plastic surgery. How much evil can one person get?"
Mike seethed.
"It's not like I had any other choice, Gretchen. Ethan left me high and dry during the campaign season. I had to do something."
Once again, she felt nothing inside but disgust.
What he had done was monstrous, no doubt, but what bored her the most was that he genuinely believed he was the victim.
You can't make a pig want to wear a sanitary pad on its period. It's just… fact. You have to have a sense for knowledge.
She stood up to leave, but Mike grabbed her wrist.
Gretchen yelped so loudly and sharply that it sounded as though his touch had burned her skin.
"My lawyers will be in touch," she said, taking two steps back. "We are done here."
"You don't have to do this, Gretchen," Mike called desperately. "I'll check you out of the hospital, and we'll live together like before."
Gretchen laughed again, but this time there was sadness in it.
"Where is my son, Mike?"
Mike's eyes widened.
He didn't know.
He had never bothered to look for Ethan.
But he still had the audacity to lie to her. "He's with his boyfriend," he said stiffly, visibly uncomfortable. "You see, our son is… um… one of those boys, you know? The kind…"
Gretchen let out a slow breath.
"Gay, Mike. He's happily gay and very much into feminism."
Mike was speechless, staring at the back of the woman who had once been his ticket out of poverty and humiliation, when it dawned on him that Gretchen and Ethan had already found each other again.
The question remained: since when?
And… divorce?
So that was it?
All his hard work, down the drain because some "sissy child" had been declared dead?
Was Gretchen serious?
She said so herself that she never even wanted to be a mother, and now she was acting like some emotional super-heroin in a children's bedtime story.
He wasn't giving her up without a fight.