It was, likely, an unhealthy obsession, but it had its bases in something totally justifiable. The utter lack of any remorse on the part of the subject, and that was all she was then, and the perpetual wound inflicted commanded his attention, even if it were only a form of perverse desire to see fate finally deal a deserved karmic blow. For him the equally shared blame was as fresh as yesterday, though only he had paid and she had forgotten everything he was before he’d ever known she had, though she feigned otherwise, part of what made her guilty as sin. He was not now a passing thought in her selfish little head, if he had ever been as any sort of real person. So, when the tables turned, and they surely would, though he might win a silent Pyrrhic victory, she would likely never even notice, or allow herself to notice, her own predicament, burying it in excuses and delusion, as always, thereby robbing him of some of his long-awaited schadenfreude. But it had to come, either way, and he did not want to miss it, knowing exactly how it would come, as that is how it always came for her. 

What was she to do now? The world was eroding around her feet, everyone’s feet, with most people, including her, ignoring it as hard as they could. Life was about to get very hard for any without a Jurassic-sized nest egg, brought on indirectly, ironically, by many of her own acquaintances, and all she had ever done to cope with insecurity when necessary was to attach herself to some degenerate male. That would assuredly be her plan now. Had it ever not been? But she had a problem—being that she had abused herself into a premature state of decay. He had never cared about that and had loved her anyway, earning his own reward of total disillusionment and stained reputation for following his heart. She likely thought that if he, younger, had fallen for her, that someone else would just the same. But she had horribly miscalculated, because he was not the shallow man of ulterior motives that she had encountered, been taken by before, and was surrounded by now. No, those around her own age, those who knew her, would never want her now, unless they had become some sort of social rejects themselves, control freaks and heretical religious lunatics who were too fraudulent, cruel, or insane for anyone else. There was no trophy in it any longer. Her only other hope of luring a fat, cushy retirement was to find a man who thought her younger than himself, in short, to find a geezer on death’s door. 

Given the sort of degenerate she had made herself subservient to in the past, that path was not out of the question, but it would require she accept the fact that she was no longer a 20-something debutant nor “catch,” and that may have been far beyond her ego. If she had enough of her own money, she might be able to temporarily snag a young gold digger to appease her narcissism, but it would never last. So, in idiosyncratic fashion, she would most assuredly take a freak, one of those she’d known marginally for decades who’d suddenly decided she was all they wanted … because she was all they could get, degrading herself, yet again, in a pattern of self-degradation. According to her world, useful was better than real, and it would never occur to her to reach for something she’d wasted that had been exactly that. She damned herself, and that was, likely, the only solace he would ever get, even if and when she began parading herself around with whatever total creep she’d settled for.