I slammed the bouquet onto the glass table with a violent crack that made the entire room jump.
“Who did this?!” I roared, leaning aggressively toward my trembling, frosting-covered wife.
She shrank back in sheer terror, her hands shielding her pregnant belly. Before she could stammer another desperate apology, I looked her dead in the eye.
“Pack your bags.”
My mother, the ice-cold matriarch sitting comfortably on the beige sofa, let out a triumphant little gasp. She had funded this house just to hold the purse strings over my marriage.
“Excuse me?” my mother asked, her eyes lighting up, fully expecting me to throw my weeping wife out onto the street.
I didn’t blink. I turned slowly to the woman who raised me.
“I told *her* to pack her bags because I’m sending her and our unborn son to a penthouse at the Four Seasons to recover from this nightmare,” I stated, my voice dropping to a lethal, unshakable calm. I pointed directly at her. “But *you*? You’re leaving today, and you’re never coming back.”
My mother’s smug composure shattered. “You can’t kick me out! My name is on the deed!”
“It *was*,” I corrected. I pulled a folded, notarized document from my breast pocket and dropped it right into the smashed blue cake. “I finalized the company buyout this morning. I paid off your debts, dissolved your share of the family trust, and put this entire estate exclusively in my wife’s name. You own absolutely nothing.”
The blood drained from my mother’s face.
“The locksmith arrives in twenty minutes,” I whispered, gently pulling my wife up from her knees and kissing her forehead. I glared down at my mother one last time. “Grab a trash bag. And don’t make a mess on your way out.”