Excerpt from ‘If All Else Fails’

Just sharing a paragraph from a short story I'm working on and intend to enter into some competitions.

Some context: this woman is being stalked by a man who has access to her home. She's gone to the police, and now she's called over her estranged son, but as she begins to tell him, she can tell that he just thinks she's crazy.

Andrew, her only child, to whom she gave everything: her life, her body, even her moderately acceptable skin complexion. Her son, whose love was much like that thing he just tried to sell her—a gesture—while his father got the real thing. Her son, whose flawlessly polished wife was her polar opposite in every way, raising her grandchildren in the most inane, insulated, and reprehensible your-house-and-your-bank-account-is-your-life way possible. She wanted to be honest. She wanted to share her thoughts for once, without fear of being shut out even more. More than anything, she wanted to look directly into her son and tell him what she went through every single day. Yet she remained quiet, convinced this stoic, desperate last stand—this decision to let him discover something for himself—was the way to go about it.