The morning of the hearing, I stood in my kitchen at 6 AM and looked at the shelves.
Pasta. A jar of sauce. Frozen vegetables in the back of the freezer behind a bag of peas we’d had since March. Half a box of cereal. The kind of pantry that tells the story of a month where something unexpected happened with the money — a car repair, a delayed payment, a gap that opened up suddenly and closed slowly.
Derek’s lawyer had photographs of these shelves. They were going to show them to a judge.
I had been up since four, going through documents at the kitchen table while the house was quiet and my daughter Lily slept down the hall. Lily, who was nine years old and had her father’s eyes and my stubbornness and who had been caught somewhere in the middle of this for two years, getting pulled in directions no child should have to navigate.
