I Let Her Ruin Herself Chapter 34
Two years later, Derek finished his minimum sentence and was granted parole.
By the time he left prison, Shirley was too old to take care of him.
The friends who had once swarmed around him, calling him boss, all had jobs and families of their own. When they saw him on the street, they crossed to the other side.
Derek had never finished high school and had no job skills. With a violent criminal record, he couldn’t even hold down a warehouse job for long.
With nowhere else to go, he thought of Taylor.
The two of them met again in the single room she rented.
The first thing Derek said was that she had to take care of him.
“You’re my woman. We raised three kids together. You can’t just refuse to look after me.”
Taylor was shaking with rage.
“My mother raised those three girls. Did you ever pay rent? Did you ever pay a single grocery bill?”
“If you hadn’t gone and had three useless daughters in a row, would I have ended up like this?”
That made Taylor go still.
When she was young, she had mistaken Derek’s control for love. She had treated his friends calling her “Mrs. Miller” as a sign of status.
She had believed she could change a dangerous man.
In return, she lost her education, her father, and her daughters’ trust.