“And what if this one’s a girl?” I asked.
He smirked. “Then we’ve got a problem, don’t we?”
From that point on, Patricia stopped hiding it in front of the children.
“Girls are cute,” she’d say loudly while the kids were in the room. “But they don’t carry the name. Boys build families.”
One night, after being tucked into bed, Mason whispered, “Mom, is Daddy mad we’re not boys?”
I swallowed my anger and wrapped my arms around her.
“Daddy loves you,” I said. “Being a girl is not something to be sorry for.”
The words felt thin, even to me.
The ultimatum came on an ordinary afternoon.
I was chopping vegetables. Derek sat at the table scrolling on his phone. Patricia wiped an already spotless counter, waiting.
She waited until the television in the living room was loud.
“If you don’t give my son a boy this time,” she said calmly, “you and your girls can crawl back to your parents. I won’t have Derek trapped in a house full of females.”
I turned off the stove and looked at Derek.
He didn’t look surprised.
“You’re okay with that?” I asked.
He leaned back and smiled. “So when are you leaving?”
My legs felt weak.
“Seriously?” I said. “You’re fine with your mom talking like our daughters aren’t enough?”
He shrugged. “I’m thirty-five, Claire. I need a son.”
Something cracked inside me then. Not loudly. Not dramatically. Just a quiet break I could feel spreading.
After that, Patricia began leaving empty boxes in the hallway.
“Just getting ready,” she’d say cheerfully. “No sense waiting until the last minute.”
She walked into our bedroom one afternoon and told Derek, “Once she’s gone, we’ll paint this room blue. A real boy’s room.”
If I cried, Derek sneered. “All that estrogen made you weak.”
I cried in the shower so the kids wouldn’t hear me. I whispered apologies to my belly. I told the baby I was trying. I didn’t know what else to do.
The only person who didn’t join in was my father-in-law, Michael.
He wasn’t warm. He wasn’t emotional. But he was decent.
He carried groceries without complaint. He asked the girls about school. He listened more than he spoke. I learned to notice the way his jaw tightened when Patricia spoke too sharply, the way his eyes followed Derek when his tone turned cruel.
He saw more than he said.
Then one morning, everything shattered.
Michael had left early for a long shift. By mid-morning, the house felt wrong. Heavy. Unsafe.
I was folding laundry in the bedroom. The girls were playing quietly with dolls. Derek lay on the couch scrolling his phone.
Patricia walked in carrying black trash bags.
My stomach dropped.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
She smiled. “Helping you.”
She stormed into our room, yanked open dresser drawers, and started shoving my clothes into the bags. Shirts, underwear, pajamas. No folding. No care.
“Stop,” I said. “Those are my things.”
“You won’t need them here,” she replied.
She moved to the girls’ closet, pulling down jackets and backpacks, tossing them into the bags.
I grabbed one. “You can’t do this.”
She yanked it away. “Watch me.”
It felt like being punched.
“Derek!” I yelled. “Tell her to stop.”
