The Last Mrs. Parrish

by Liv Constantine

Dating as a means to getting to know someone is highly overrated. When your hormones are raging and the attraction is magnetic, your brain takes a vacation. He was everything I never knew I needed.

They were everywhere. It was too much. The cloying smell of the flowers overwhelmed me and made my stomach roil. Fiona was staring

That was the first time I saw it—that little smile that played at his lips, and the look in his eyes that read Victory.

And even though there were times I had a small, nagging feeling in my stomach, I

never consciously understood how much his need for order and control would overpower my life.

I was learning that emotional intimidation could be just as unsettling as physical.

I felt a nervous stirring in my gut. “What if it’s a girl?” He shrugged. “Then we’ll try again.”

He’s crazy. How did it take me this long to see that he’s crazy? I swallowed hard and flinched when his fingers traced the tears running down my cheeks.

My legs were so jellylike, I don’t know how I remained standing. I made my mind go blank, shut my eyes, and pretended I was anywhere but there.

When you discover you are married to a sociopath, you have to become resourceful. There’s no point in trying to change him—once the pot is in the kiln, it’s too late. The best I could do was study him—the real him, the one hiding behind his well-polished veneer of humanity and normalcy. Now that I knew the truth, it was easy to spot. Things like the small smile playing at his lips when he was pretending to be sad. He was a brilliant mimic and knew just what to say and do to ingratiate himself into the affections of others. Now that he’d dropped the facade with me, I had to figure out how to beat him at his own game.

Spouses of sociopaths are said to have an overabundance of empathy. I found that bit of information hard to understand. Is there really such a thing as too much empathy? It had a certain poetic irony, though. If sociopaths are said to lack empathy and their victims to have too much, they would seem to make a perfect match.

All she’d wanted was the life she deserved. It didn’t occur to her that she had gotten it.