My name is Julie, and at twenty-two my life was pretty much ruined already. What did I do? More or less, nothing. A part getting a crush on the wrong guy, and getting pregnant. Michael Albert Glanrty III was the heir of a very rich family, and they would have never accepted me. I was so naïve I thought they would, and that our love would be stronger than any prejudice. Just that it wasn’t stronger. It wasn’t even love from his part.
Being well known in the area where we were dating, when I found I was pregnant he couldn’t say it wasn’t his child, so his family decided that we would marry to avoid scandal, but treated me from the beginning as a gold-digger slut.
I barely managed to graduate from high school, being hated by the whole school for ‘trapping’ the most sought heir of the area, and at eighteen I was due for a life in a luxurious hell, even if I wasn’t realizing it yet.
I had to sign a prenuptial that would leave me with nothing if I was ever found cheating on him – while it said nothing about him cheating on me – and gave me a little coverage only in the case he was going to divorce me, with a settlement that would allow me to at least not suffer from starvation, but I would still need to find a job anyway. At the time I didn’t care, I was in love and thought we would have a happy life, and nothing bad would ever happen to us. Yes, I was living in the land of rainbows and unicorns, and I refused to open my eyes despite the clear signals. He was treating me coldly, but I was justifying that as consequence of him being mashed between his family and the love for me. Too soon, or maybe not soon enough, I would be forced to open my eyes and see that he wasn’t mashed between anything, but pissed off at being forced to marry one of the many girls he just wanted to use and throw away.
My parents had never been much present, and since the time I was able to manage myself at the age of fourteen, they more or less left me alone, only providing me with enough money for food, clothes and bills. Since I was a loner, they weren’t worried I would throw parties or such at home, but probably wouldn't have cared anyway. I never felt any love from them, and it was almost like I was a burden they would gladly do without. When they learned I was pregnant and about to marry, they clearly said that as soon as I graduated and married, being of age and with a husband that could provide for me, I was on my own and they would stop paying for my living. In practice, they disowned me with a few words. Despite a life with almost nothing from them in the love department, that was a blow, and pushed me to rely even more in the illusion of love that Michael had given me for a while. If I think now how naïve and deluded I was, I could only say I ran blindly into disaster.
I was never allowed to live in the mansion of Michael’s family, and he wasn’t going to live in my small house, which I would soon have to leave anyway, so the few months before the marriage were a very lonely period. He almost always made excuses to avoid visiting me or seeing me and I was missing him, but still finding justifications for his behaviour. I know now he was going around dating other girls and badmouthing me at every chance, using that to elicit sympathy from his next conquests.
The wedding was held in a private civil ceremony, no parties and no decorations, to make clear nobody was happy about it and they were completely against such a thing as a wedding to me. They would have likely paid me to forget everything about this thing and accept never telling who the father was, but even if they were badmouthing and slandering me around, they perfectly knew that I was completely in love with Michael and would never accept such a deal, so they didn’t ever try it to me. I was showing already and even if I wasn’t happy about such a wedding ceremony, I by then understood that his family would never accept me. That day though, I also had to open my eyes in the worst possible manner, with the shock of my life, when I had the undeniable evidence that he wasn’t in love with me either, after finding him having sex with one of the housemaids.
He saw me, my tears and my shock, and his reaction was simply to laugh in my face, while the maid saw me and also laughed at me, saying something disrespectful that I didn’t fully understand, because I fainted. By falling I must have hit somewhere because when I woke up I was in a hospital room, alone.
An old nurse entered a few moments later and saw me awake. She told me that everything would be fine, and not to worry, I would be fine in a few days. I was by then aware that I was flat in my tummy, and asked about my baby. She caressed my cheek and told me she was sorry, but I lost her. She was a girl. I was desperate, and tears were flowing down my cheeks. I asked about my husband, and she said that I was brought there by the ambulance that had been called, but nobody followed.
My next days were passed in desperation, crying and self-pity. I had nobody but myself to blame about what happened. I tried to call my parents, but they weren’t reachable, and they had no voice mail. The day I was to leave the hospital, a guy in a dark blue suit came to visit me. He was a young associate of a known law firm, the Arthur Forkes Legal Associates, commonly known as AFLA, and had a message and some documents for me to sign. In short, since I wasn’t going to have a baby from Michael, they had the marriage voided. Not annulled, simply it never happened. No documents about it were existing anymore.
They paid the hospital bill, since I’ve been taken by the ambulance there from the Glantry’s home, but were telling me through the lawyer – writing it would be a document that could put them in trouble – they would make sure I would never find a job in that city. The young lawyer was stunned himself, and very sorry for me. He was told I was a gold digger, but being quite young, he had a younger sister in my same high school who told him I was just naïve and had been so stupid to believe Michael was the right one. It was well known he was knocking up girls continuously, just with me he made the mistake of being dating me officially, so he couldn’t pay for an abortion or threaten the family to keep their mouth shut. So this lawyer, unbeknownst to the family, had gathered some money – not much, but for someone like me who owned nothing it was a lot – and gave me three thousand bucks and a ticket to a far-away city. He told me he couldn’t do more, and that if they knew he would be ruined as well, so to please do not ever try to contact him.
I had no will to react, I was like a zombie, who was going to do what was asked of me. In that moment, if they told me it would be better if I died, I would probably have jumped from the roof of the highest building I could find. I thanked him, gathered the few clothes someone got from my house and the things the lawyer gave me and left the hospital.
Oh, for the record, my ‘best friend’ from high school never spoke to me after I got pregnant. I found out later that she was the one practically pimping me to him, to earn his favour, and was upset that I was going to marry him, ‘stealing’ him from her. So, in the end, I lost my virginity, my parents, my house, my husband, my friends and what was most painful, I lost my daughter. All in a few months. I don’t know what didn’t push me to suicide then, probably I was so deep in apathy that I didn’t even have the strength to think about it.
The two days of coach travel allowed me to rest some, more for exhaustion than for will, and in that time a new determination to survive filled me. Not to rebuild, to restart and get a better life, just for the simple reason that I felt I had to punish myself for being that stupid and allowing such stupidity to kill my baby. I was convinced I deserved a life of loneliness, and anyway I couldn’t trust anyone anymore.
