Just because you leave them it doesn’t mean you’re rid of them
CINDERELLA MOVED THE LAST BOX into her new apartment with a view of an orange grove and a duck pond. She wiped the dust from her hands. Free at last. No more sisters who called on the court for favors every day, and no more Prince. He told her it was love at first sight, but she should have been suspicious when he needed a glass slipper, and not her face, to recognize her.
Then she found a wardrobe filled with glass slippers. Dozens of glass slippers. She dragged her handmaiden to the wardrobe and demanded to know what was going on.
“You weren’t supposed to find out until the next annual ball.”
Ella stomped her foot so hard she’d have broken the heel if she were wearing the glass slipper. “Tell me what?”
The handmaiden blushed. She reminded Ella of a puppy caught in the larder with the meat for the night’s supper. “You weren’t the first. Or the last. You’re just the one he married.”
Ella found a wardrobe filled with glass slippers. Dozens of glass slippers. She dragged her handmaiden to the wardrobe and demanded to know what was going on. “You weren’t supposed to find out until the next annual ball.”
Which explained the need for the slipper. It wasn’t that he’d forgotten her face so much as he’d seen so many he could no longer tell the difference.
Ella pointed to the empty slot in the wardrobe. “What happened to this pair?” Then she understood the reference to “the last.” Which is why she had just finished moving into her new apartment with a view of an orange grove and a duck pond.
Her mother and sisters had rushed to the palace to talk Ella out of her decision. Her sisters poked through her closets. “You’re really giving all this up?” Drizella whined.
Her mother lectured her, “Who cares if he has a wandering eye? How do you think your father met me? What matters is now we’re rich, and if you leave him, we’ll be poor.”
“Good,” Ella had replied, and started packing.
Someone knocked on her door. She checked the peephole. Two members of the Prince’s guard stood in the hallway. When she allowed them in, they informed her the Prince demanded she return the gifts he’d given her. Including the glass slippers.
The Prince’s guards informed Ella the Prince demanded she return the gifts he’d given her. Including the glass slippers.
She surveyed the boxes, then realized she’d taken nothing from the palace that she hadn’t owned before she married, and the gifts other people gave her. But she wanted nothing given her by that beast of a Prince. And one reason was to avoid exactly this confrontation. “But I don’t have them. I left them at the palace.”
The guard held his smart phone six inches from her nose. His browser had loaded eBay to a page offering her “Genuine princess’ glass slippers” with a starting bid of 3,000 guilders.
That was the moment she realized she would never get rid of her sisters.
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