She was just one of those people who always managed to land on her feet.
She‘d had her doubts about the marriage from the beginning. Most of these misgivings were centred on his obstinate streak. He always insisted on doing things his way, whether he knew what he was doing or not. Despite this, she was willing to give it a go, on the grounds that it might improve as time went on. It didn’t. In fact, it got worse. The original idea was to get a place out of town, in a quiet rural setting, but this got shelved when the house they moved into came onto the market at a very attractive price. It was no dream home. It needed a lot of fixing up. Naturally, he considered that he’d watched enough DIY shows on TV that he didn’t need to get tradesmen in for anything.
In the first few months he spent most evenings and weekends stripping old paint and repainting, fixing broken sections in their garden fence, replacing several roof tiles and so on. As time went on it became obvious that the work he was doing was pretty shoddy and wasn’t improving the place at all. She was getting really fed up with this state of affairs when he said he thought some of the house’s wiring needed to be replaced. She had her doubts about this and said so. She suggested that he at least hire an electrician for this part of the renovation, but, of course, he insisted that he could manage it. He was up in the loft poking around in the wiring when she heard a loud bang. She went to the bottom of the stairs and looked up to see sparks were still drifting down from the ceiling hatch.
With the unexpectedly high life insurance policy’s payout, she bought a nice little cottage in the country.