Two months, that’s what he got. In retrospect it would become clear she’d sewn herself up safe from the start.

He chose to stay in the spread by the sea. He was permitted two more months, legally. He remained in a suspended state of shock and he wanted every second.

He knew nothing like this would ever happen again. Nothing even close. He had tasted the best of everything though. He had lived it.

She had been a witch to everyone he introduced her. And everyone swallowed it because she was a ‘movie star’. A big name in the 70s. She too was in her 70s and despite the dough and the countless treatments it was starting to show.

She kept to a diet of coffee and alcohol.

She was tolerated because of her fabulous past. A ‘movie star’ from television, loved and disdained all at once. Loved for her candy-cute acting, she could pout like a cherry. And she was fantastically wealthy.

She fell for him instantly, obsessively. She overwhelmed him, like a butterfly net, into which he willingly relaxed. They married. She worshiped him and she provoked the worst in him, “I’m not flying commercial again until I have to!’ he learned to declare. He was in her sway, hypnotized. He was slurping all the Chateau Kool-Aide within reach.

They were the show wherever they went. Everyone wanted to meet the ‘movie star’. Impossible to know exactly the start of the end but some supposed he had become too familiar. Had lost the plot. He thought all this was real.

One day she came home and stated she, ‘didn’t care anymore’.

He got a pay-off and two last months at the beach house. Her coldness toward him was dismantling, he barely ate or slept, he stared out at the ocean from the bedroom balcony. He would have trouble adjusting, walking on flat ground again. He never saw this coming. Dummy.