Jack & Jilted by Cathy Yardley

responsible for half of those bills. You don’t even have a legal leg to stand on.”
    Chloe knew that Gerald had a mercenary side—she’d seen it occasionally at the firm. But this wasn’t him. This, she could tell, was his mother. He was all but channeling her words. And for that woman, it wasn’t about the money. It was about punishing the classless little “secretary” who had believed she could social climb by marrying the precious Sutton son. No matter how much Chloe had tried to convince the woman she was marrying Gerald because she loved him, the mother had refused to let go. And now she was doing everything she could to crush Chloe and her family into the ground.
    “How is it,” Chloe mused, “that I never noticed what an unbelievable liar and cheat you could be?”
    “Yeah, well…” Gerald spluttered, then stopped, obviously unable to come up with a reply.
    “All right then,” she said. “The house. We just bought a house together. What about that?”
    “I don’t feel like talking about all this right now, Chloe.”
    “Well, you’re going to have to!”
    “No, I won’t,” he said. “I’ve got a dinner date with Simone and I don’t have time to talk.”
    He threw that in just to hurt her—to force her to hang up. Simone. Chloe remembered seeing her around the firm occasionally. She was the daughter of a family friend. She had to be maybe twenty-three years old, just out of college. She would have the right breeding. Hell, they had a house in the same neighborhood as the Suttons. She probably was handpicked by Gerald’s mother.
    “Besides, I think that’s also being handled by our lawyers. I don’t think we should talk again, Chloe,” Gerald said, finishing off his one-two punch of cruelty. “This has all been way too upsetting.”
    Well, God forbid you get upset by all of this.
    “This isn’t the end of it,” Chloe said.
    “It is for me,” he said. “Goodbye, Chloe.”
    And with that, he hung up.
    Chloe sat there for a second, on the edge of her childhood bed, listening to the dial tone ringing in her ear before finally shutting off the phone.
    Oh, my God. Oh, my God.
    It was a good thing she didn’t have an action plan, she thought inanely, because anything she could’ve planned would have been torpedoed after a conversation like that. She didn’t know he was capable of that kind of meanness. She didn’t know anyone was.
    Chloe plowed through her archived boxes of paperwork. She hadn’t moved the boxes to the new house, thankfully. With her retirement fund, her savings and selling a few things, she should be able to cover the wedding bills so her parents wouldn’t have to. She’d even be able to cover a few months’ worth of mortgage on the house. Of course, with Gerald’s logic, if I’m not living there I shouldn’t have to pay a dime, she thought, depressed. But she got the uneasy feeling that he’d let the place foreclose and ruin her credit out of spite, so she budgeted for that, too. Leaving her with…
    Not very much. Actually, less than not very much.
    I have got to get a job, she thought frantically. Something that paid as well as her last job, if not better. Oh, and there was another thing—what kind of reference was she going to get when her last employer was the same slimeball that had put her in this position? Not to mention the fact that the economy in town wasn’t that great. She’d looked into temping, just a little, after she’d quit working for Gerald. Despite her skills, she didn’t have the degree or the title necessary to command the top-dollar hourly rate. And it could be a while before she got another permanent job, with all these obstacles.
    She could just cry.
    She knew her parents were worried about her, but she also knew they were in no position to help her, and she wasn’t going to ask. She didn’t want to beg money from her relatives, either, even if they could help…the Wintons weren’t really all that affluent a clan. There was