Losing my husband shattered me. But two days after his funeral, my mother-in-law made it worse. She kicked me and my kids out, changed the locks, and left us homeless. She thought she won, but she had no idea she was making the biggest mistake of her life.When I married Ryan two years ago, I wasn’t naive about his mother. Margaret never bothered hiding her disdain for me, her eyes always narrowing slightly whenever I entered a room, as if I brought in a bad smell along with me.

“She’ll come around, Cat,” Ryan would say, squeezing my hand under the dinner table as his mother pointedly asked him, and only him, about his day.But she never did come around. Not to me, and certainly not to Emma (5) and Liam (7), my children from my previous marriage.One Sunday dinner at her house, I overheard her talking to her friend in the kitchen.”The children aren’t even his,” she whispered, unaware I was approaching with empty plates. “She trapped him with her ready-made family. Classic gold-digger move.”I froze in the hallway, plates trembling in my hands.