The Other Mrs. Cross
A signature I had never given, on paperwork I had never seen, for a clause that had apparently existed for years without my knowledge, ticking down toward a deadline nobody had ever bothered to mention to the person it actually belonged to.
I sat there in my dark kitchen with my laptop screen the only light in the room and thought about that word. Legacy. Something ancestors leave you, something proven and past-tense, something that sounds valuable precisely because it sounds finished, done, safely settled somewhere in the past and I knew with a renewed clean fury I hadn't felt yet in this whole ordeal, that it was exactly the right word for what he turned me into inside my own company.
Not