Fantasy Life Read Online Free PDF Page A

comfortable duplex.
    The divorce had left her broke and frightened and more than a little guilty. Wives promised to stick by their husbands through thick and thin, and she had fully expected to do that.
    But Reginald’s schizophrenia—which had appeared full strength in the middle of May a year before—had made being traditional impossible. The psychiatrists never believed Lyssa that Reginald had shown no symptoms before. Being schizophrenic, the doctors claimed, didn’t develop over time like Alzheimer’s or diabetes. It usually manifested long before someone’s thirty-fifth birthday.
    The doctors claimed that Reginald’s schizophrenia had to have existed before, and that Lyssa had done him a disservice by taking him off his medications.
    The doctors also claimed Lyssa’s negligence had hurt Emily. For a while, until Lyssa hired the best lawyer in the area, it looked like the State of Wisconsin was going to remove Emily from the Walters household for good.
    Lyssa had managed to shield Emily from all of that, somehow, and Emily didn’t remember most of the bad stuff, since Reginald had been aware enough to stay away when the paranoia and hallucinations started.
    But some magazine journalist got wind of Reginald’s illness. The journalist was already doing a piece for
The Atlantic
on the link between the duPont family’s business and the mental illness that ran in that family. With the advent of Reginald’s bizarre schizophrenia, and mental illness in other wealthy families whose initial source of wealth had to do with chemicals or petroleum, the journalist felt he had a wider story.
    The Walters family heard about the story before Lyssa did, and they swooped in to take care of Reginald. He got flown to their doctors, taken to their clinics, and forced to live in their ways. He couldn’t really defend himself against the family any longer.
    And the family decided to make Lyssa the villain, claiming that she had ignored his illness until it got extreme. That was when the need for the divorce had become crystal clear.
    After that, she knew that to keep her daughter out of the custody of the state or the Walters grandparents, who had never visited Emily, not once, and had never acknowledged her with a Christmas or birthday card, let alone a gift, Lyssa would have to get out of the marriage quickly.
    She managed to, while the Walters family focused on quashing the negative publicity raised by Reginald’s illness. Reginald managed to come back for the custody hearings, since he wanted joint custody, but Lyssa couldn’t agree to that, not with the Walters doctors claiming that Reginald wasn’t schizophrenic at all, just “exhausted,” and refusing to give him proper treatment. Without the treatment, he might try to kill Emily again.
    The Walters family stayed out of that battle. For the first time, Lyssa was pleased that they refused to acknowledge her as their daughter-in-law, and Emily as their granddaughter. It made the final fight that much easier. She doubted she would have been able to win otherwise against the Walters fortune.
    Lyssa pushed the damp hair off her forehead. Her hair was black and heavy, and she had kept it long until the beginning of this summer. She couldn’t face more heat and humidity with long hair trailing down her back. She had cropped her hair short, and Emily’s too, making them both look a bit like the Gainsborough painting the
Blue Boy
—young and somewhat surprised at the way things had gone.
    Lyssa didn’t feel young anymore. She’d known, when she’dturned thirty, that her future would be different, but she hadn’t realized how different. The past four years had aged her.
    She suspected it would only get worse.
    As she approached the house, she realized the garage door was open. She sighed. She had asked Emily time and again to close that door. Madison was a relatively safe town, but now that they lived near Camp Randall Stadium, they would be subject to game-day pranks and