I was thirty-six and eleven months divorced when my neighbor first started making comments about my house. The first one came casually, almost like a joke: “She wouldn’t know what to do with a house like yours.” I laughed because I didn’t know what else to do. Nobody had noticed my house in a year, and honestly, nobody had noticed me either. After that, the comments came in pieces. He’d say I was lucky someone else had paid for everything, that I probably couldn’t keep the place without my ex-husband, and that I seemed like the kind of woman who needed someone to take care of her. I never defended myself. Not once. Even when he said it in front of my sister, I just smiled and told her, “He’s just like that.”
His wife was completely different. She waved to me every morning, brought me soup when I had the flu in February, and once sat in my kitchen for nearly an hour while I cried about something that had nothing to do with her. I knew what her husband had said about me just four days earlier, but she clearly didn’t. Or maybe she did and had chosen not to believe him. For two years, she kept treating me like I mattered while he treated me like I was beneath him. Then one afternoon in June, she stopped me in the produce aisle, put her hand on my cart, and looked around to make sure nobody was standing close enough to hear us.
She said, “He’s told you I’m simple, hasn’t he?” I didn’t answer. She smiled sadly and continued, “He tells everyone that. He tells people you’re barely keeping your house, that your divorce left you desperate, and that I’ve been feeling sorry for you all this time.” Then she reached into her purse and pulled out a folder. Inside were copies of messages her husband had been sending to my ex-husband for almost a year. I recognized my address immediately. She looked at me and whispered, “I didn’t bring these to hurt you. I brought them because yesterday I found out why he suddenly wants your house so badly — and I think you deserve to know what he’s been planning to do with it.”
