My husband str:uck my mother twice right in front of me and demanded, “Either she leaves tonight or our marriage is over.”

My mother stumbled backward into the wooden console table near the entrance.

A small blue ceramic vase shook at the edge, fell onto the hardwood floor, and shattered into dozens of tiny pieces.

My husband, Brandon, was still standing there with his right hand raised, his fingers stiff and his knuckles pale.

I stared at him in disbelief.

“What on earth are you doing?”

His face was completely red with rage.

He pointed aggressively at my mother and shouted, “Why don’t you ask your thieving mother what she did?”

According to Brandon, $10,500 had disappeared from a hidden drawer inside his private office desk.

He claimed that he had gone downstairs for only a few minutes to pick up a package from the lobby.

When he came back upstairs, the cash was gone.

My mother had been the only other person inside the apartment.

I turned toward her, my heart pounding.

“Mom, did you take the money from his desk?”

She was holding her swollen cheek with both hands, tears filling her eyes.

“No, sweetie,” she whispered. “I swear to God I didn’t touch it.”

Brandon gave a harsh, cruel laugh.

“Oh, sure. So those hundred-dollar bills just magically grew legs and walked right out of the front door by themselves?”

Margaret tried to explain through her tears that she had only been cleaning the furniture.

She said she had opened the drawer briefly to wipe dust from the edges, but she insisted she had never touched anything inside it.

Brandon refused to listen to a word.

Instead, he immediately launched into a bitter rant about everything he supposedly hated about having her in the apartment.

She made too much noise when she cooked early in the morning.

She used too much butter in her food.

She watched television too late at night.

Her presence, according to him, was suffocating him inside his own home.

I stared at my husband and felt as if I were looking at a stranger.

When Mom first moved in with us, Brandon had been the one who drove to the Amtrak station in central Milwaukee to pick her up.