60 Days Before the Apocalypse,I Divorced My Cheating Husband

Twenty days. That was how long Giada Vitale had survived the apocalypse.

First came the hailstorm, then the poisonous fog. The power failed, temperatures plunged, and clean water became harder to find than food. By the twentieth day, the Vitale family had run out of both supplies and excuses for keeping her alive. 

Enzo and Nadia had decided she would feed them instead.

Giada understood what they intended when her husband refused to meet her eyes. She had worked for this family, cooked for them, handed over her wages, and spent the last twenty days dividing her own food so everyone else could eat. Now she was the one they had decided they could do without.

Even then, she was thinking about Matteo. 

"Don't let him see," she whispered. "Whatever you're going to do, keep him upstairs."

Enzo finally looked at her. Something passed between him and Nadia, and his brother's wife gave a small, impatient sigh.

"She's still worrying about him."

"Then we might as well let her die knowing the truth," Enzo replied.

Giada stared at them as Nadia stepped closer and rested a hand on his shoulder. Neither of them made any attempt to hide the familiarity of it.

"Matteo was never an adopted child," Enzo told her. "He's mine and Nadia's."

For a moment, Giada forgot what they were about to do.

She remembered the blue blanket, the story about the boy's dead parents, the way Enzo had told her they were the only family willing to take him. She had agreed because she thought they were giving a child a home. For three years, she had raised him as her own while his real mother sat across from her at Sunday dinners and watched.

"The miscarriage?" she asked, looking at Nadia.

"There wasn't one," Nadia answered. "That was what we told Dario."

Giada's lips parted, but nothing came out. Dario had grieved for a baby who had never died, while she had spent three years caring for a child whose parents had been lying to her the entire time.

 "Why give him to me?"

Enzo looked almost irritated by the question.

 "Because you had money, Giada. You were bringing in more than anyone else in the house. A wife with a child to worry about doesn't walk away so easily."

"He needed someone to raise him, and we needed you to stay," Nadia added. "It worked for everyone."

For everyone except her.

Giada looked at the two of them, finally understanding why every attempt to save a little money, spend an evening out, or complain about the way she was treated had ended with someone reminding her that Matteo needed a mother. They had handed her a child and used him to keep her working, paying, and coming back.

She tried to speak again, but Enzo had already stabbed her.

Giada's mouth opened, but the scream refused to come. Air leaked out of her instead, hot and wet, and she heard herself make a sound like a kettle being emptied.

She looked down and saw Enzo's hand still on the hilt. He was looking at her, but not at her face. At her che-st. Like he was checking the seal on a jar.

"Don't drag it out," Nadia said behind him. "Our boy might wake up."

The boy. Even now. Even here.

Enzo twisted the knife slightly as he pulled it fr-ee. The world tilted. Giada's legs folded, and the kitchen floor came up to meet her cheek—cold, gritty, still dusty with the ash they had tracked in from the street. Blood pooled beneath her.

Her vision blurred at the edges, then narrowed to a single strip of light. Through it she saw Enzo turn away, wiping the knife on a dish towel—the one she had embroidered, she realized, the one with the little daisies—while Nadia glanced up the stairs, listening for footsteps.

Neither of them looked back at her.

That was the last thing she remembered.

Giada sat straight up in bed, gasping so hard her lungs burned. Sweat soaked through her nightshirt. Her hands moved over her arms, her stomach, and her throat before she seemed to understand what she was doing.

She was whole. Warm. Alive.

The ugly floral curtains Teresa had picked out hung beside the window. The cracked ceiling fan turned overhead. On the wall, the calendar showed June 15th.

 Two months before the apocalypse would begin.

She reached for her phone and checked the date, staring at the screen until the numbers stopped blurring in front of her eyes.

"I'm alive," she whispered.

 The tears came before she could stop them, hot and silent, slipping down her face while she sat motionless in the bed where she had spent four years waking up to someone else's demands. She let them fall for a moment, then wiped them away with the back of her hand and took a slow breath.

She remembered everything. The sequence of disasters. The places that fell first and the ones that held out longest. The way ordinary people changed when food ran short and there was nobody left to enforce the rules.

 She also remembered what Enzo and Nadia had told her.

From the kitchen came the scrape of a chair, followed by Teresa complaining about breakfast. The familiar sound brought her attention back to the room.

She had three months.

Whatever had brought her back, she wasn't going to waste the time asking for explanations from people who would only lie to her again. She needed to leave this house, end the marriage, and start preparing for what was coming.

This time, she wanted a home of her own and a life that belonged to her. The Vitale family could make their own arrangements.

She dressed fast, put her identification and bank card into her purse, and walked down the hallway toward the kitchen.

Teresa Vitale was sitting at the table in her floral housecoat, tapping a spoon against the edge of an empty bowl. Nadia stood by the counter with a cup of coffee in her hand, having stopped by on her way to the hospital as she often did. Neither of them had bothered to feed the boy sitting on the couch.

"Where do you think you're going this early?" Teresa demanded when she saw Giada with her purse. "Matteo hasn't eaten yet. You think that boy feeds himself?"

Giada looked at her, then at Nadia. The other woman was stirring sugar into her coffee as though there was nothing unusual about standing in someone else's kitchen while her own child waited for someone else to make his breakfast.

"I'm leaving," Giada told her. Her voice was flat. Calm in a way that made Teresa blink.

"Leaving? What are you talking about, leaving? Get back in that kitchen and make the boy his eggs."

"There's bread in the cupboard and eggs in the fridge. You can manage breakfast without me."

 Matteo finally looked away from the television. He slid off the couch, came into the kitchen, and tugged at Giada's sleeve with the impatient expression she had seen on Teresa's face a hundred times.

"I want eggs. Go make them."

"Ask your grandmother," Giada replied, gently removing his hand from her sleeve.

His face crumpled, but instead of reaching for her again, he grabbed a small bowl from the low kitchen shelf and hurled it at the floor. It shattered beside her shoes, and the boy immediately burst into a loud, furious wail, stamping his feet as he pointed at the kitchen.

"Make my breakfast! You're bad! Grandma says you have to do what I say!"

 Teresa reached for him, but there was no reprimand, no instruction to apologize. "Look what you've done. The poor boy's hungry, and you won't even make him a few eggs."

Matteo pushed against her arm and screamed louder, his eyes fixed on Giada as though the noise alone should be enough to send her back to the stove. He wasn't frightened that she was leaving. He was angry that she had refused an order, and when she didn't move, he pointed at the broken bowl and demanded that she clean it up.

Giada looked at the child she had carried through fevers and rocked to sleep, remembering how often she had excused this same tone because he was little, because he was tired, because he would learn. But nobody else in this house had ever asked him to speak to her differently. They had taught him that her job was to serve them, and he had learned that lesson perfectly.

Even after learning the truth about his parents, some part of her had still ached at the thought of leaving him. Standing in the kitchen with pieces of his bowl scattered around her feet, she felt that last hope settle into a quiet, complete disappointment. Three years of loving him had made her useful to him, just as it had to the rest of them.

"I'm not making breakfast, Matteo," she said. "Your grandmother can help you."

When it became clear that Giada wasn't going to give in, Teresa steered him back to the couch and turned up the television. His cries subsided into angry sniffles, leaving Giada standing beside the mess he expected her to clean.

 Teresa's face turned red. She set down her spoon hard enough to rattle the bowl and pushed back her chair.

"You ungrateful little leech! I let you live under my roof. I feed you. I put clothes on your back. And this is how you talk to me?"

In her old life, that voice would have made Giada shrink. She would have lowered her eyes and apologized and gone straight to the stove like a dog returning to its kennel.

Instead, she checked that her phone was in her purse.

Nadia set down her coffee and crossed the kitchen, irritation tightening her face.

"Stop making a scene. Some of us have actual work to get to, and Matteo's been waiting long enough."

"Then you can make him something before you leave."

Nadia stared at her, then caught her arm. When Giada pulled free, Nadia shoved her shoulder hard enough to knock her against the edge of the counter.

"Don't walk away when I'm talking to you."

Giada caught Nadia's wrist before she could push her again. Nadia jerked forward, her loose hair falling over Giada's hand, and Giada took the opportunity to close her fingers around several strands as she pushed the woman back.

Nadia pulled away with a sharp cry, leaving a few hairs caught between Giada's fingers.

"Did you just pull my hair?"

"Keep your hands to yourself," Giada answered.

She released Nadia's wrist, took a clean tissue from her purse, and folded the strands inside it while the other woman rubbed her scalp and complained to Teresa.

Then she walked over to where three year old Matteo was sitting on the couch watching cartoons. The boy barely glanced at her. She leaned down, pulled a small pair of scissors from her purse, and snipped a lock of his hair before he could react. She folded it into another tissue and kept the two samples separate.

"What the hell are you doing to that boy?" Teresa hurried toward her, her slippers slapping against the tiles.

"Something I should have done a long time ago." Giada answered calmly, placing both samples in her purse.

Nadia stopped rubbing her head.

For a moment, the kitchen was quiet enough for Giada to hear the cartoon playing in the living room. She looked at Nadia, saw the uncertainty creeping into her expression, and turned toward the front door.

Teresa moved into her path.

"You don't get to take whatever you like and walk out of my house."

"My clothes, my documents, and my purse," Giada told her. "Move."

Teresa reached for her bag. Giada pulled it out of her grip, stepped around her, and opened the door before she could block her again.

She had already given this family four years. They weren't getting another morning.

Her phone rang before she reached the end of the driveway. Enzo's name flashed on the screen. She answered it the way someone answers a telemarketer. Bored and already done with the conversation.

"What did you do to Nadia?" Enzo's voice was shaking with rage. "My mother says you've lost your mind."

"She pushed me. I stopped her."

"Get back to the house right now and apologize. You don't get to leave everyone standing there without breakfast because you're in a bad mood."

Giada stopped beside the bus shelter and adjusted the strap of her purse.

"I want a divorce, Enzo."

The line went dead quiet.

"Today," she added, her voice steady. "Let's get it done."