Mark’s shoes squeaked as they scraped against the tile floor that I had mopped with tears that very afternoon. This time, that floor was a silent witness to the expulsion of the parasite that had been eating away at my happiness. Seeing Mark being dragged away, Jessica tried to take the opportunity to slip away, but I wouldn’t let her escape so easily. I called her name loudly. Jessica froze, her body tensed. I ordered the bodyguard to make sure Jessica also went out the door of my house and that she took nothing but the clothes on her back. The handbag, phone, and jewelry bought with fraudulent money had already been confiscated.
Jessica looked at me with pleading eyes, but I turned away. She had to feel what it was like to have nothing. Just as she had tried to trample on my dignity earlier, Mark and Jessica were pushed out the front door, stumbling onto the front yard. The sky, which had been holding back, finally broke. The rain began to pour down in sheets. Not a drizzle, but a deluge that soaked them in an instant. The rainwater mixed with Mark’s tears. He got up, drenched. His hair, once neatly styled, now hung limply over his forehead. He ran back to the porch, banging on the glass door that the bodyguards had locked from the inside.
He screamed my name, begging for forgiveness, saying he had nowhere to go. He said his wallet was left inside, and he didn’t have a single dollar in his pocket because I had told the bodyguard not to give it to him. I stood behind the large living room window, watching the scene outside with an empty heart. The porch light illuminated Mark’s pathetic figure. He pounded on the glass, his face pressed against it, distorted by the streams of rain. He looked like a ghost from the past, trying to haunt me. But this glass now separated us. Behind Mark, Jessica stood shivering from the cold. Her mascara had run, staining her cheeks and making her look like a weeping clown.