Tom Riddle looked down at the small bottle he held in his hand. It wasn't supposed to be this way. He was a Riddle, and Riddles didn't fall in love. Marriage was a matter of business, of advancement, it wasn't a matter of love. There were times when he wished he hadn't been born into such an...unscrupulous family.
Merope had given him the deed to her share of the rather choice land that her family's hovel sat upon. Five generations of effort had just been ended with a bout of ungodly good luck and the stroke of a pen. For five generations his family had been trying to get the Gaunt land as it was the only land in the area that they didn't own, and for five generations the Gaunts had stubbornly clung to every inch of it despite the fact that the sale of their land would have left them reasonably well off. The sizable parcel of woodland that Merope's grandfather had left her had broken the property nearly in half. A half that the Riddle family now posessed.
Several Mrs. Riddles had had their lives cut short by the contents of bottles similiar to this one after they had given the family what they wanted, be it land, money, or connections they wouldn't have been able to get otherwise. Merope, his ugly but surprisingly lovable Merope who had dedicated her entire existence to him since the day of the wedding should be no exception. But she was, and it was tearing him up inside.
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Years after he left Merope - taking the deed to her inheritance - rather than killing her, a boy with his face showed up to kill him. His last thought before the curse hit was that this was what he deserved. Merope had deserved a long and happy life with someone who would have been as devoted to her as she had been to him, not an ignoble death in an orphanage birthing the spawn of a family that may as well have originated in the depths of hell.