“Mr. Ford, control your client!” Judge Henderson snapped, his voice rising for the first time.
“Your Honor,” Garrison Ford interjected smoothly, sensing the judge’s patience thinning like ice in spring. “While my client’s passion is perhaps regrettable, his point has merit. We are wasting the court’s valuable time. Mrs. Simmons has clearly not secured representation. Under the precedent of Vargas v. State, we move to proceed immediately with a default judgment on the asset division. She has had months to prepare for this hearing.”Judge Henderson looked at me, and for a moment I saw what he saw: a woman alone, unprepared, defeated before the battle even began. He looked tired, like a man who’d seen this story play out a thousand times.
“Mrs. Simmons,” he said, and there was almost gentleness in his voice. “Mr. Ford is technically correct. The court’s time is valuable, and we have fourteen more cases to hear today. If you cannot produce an attorney right now, I have to assume you are representing yourself pro se. And given the complexity of the forensic accounting involved in your husband’s estate, that would be… ill-advised.”
“I am not representing myself,” I said, my eyes fixed on the double mahogany doors at the back of the room. Please. Please don’t let me down. Not now. “Just two more minutes. Please.”“She’s stalling,” Keith hissed, his voice dripping with venom. “She’s got nobody. Her father was a mechanic in Queens and her mother’s been dead for fifteen years. Her friends are all suburban housewives who can barely balance a checkbook. Who is she going to call? Ghostbusters?”
Keith laughed again, that cruel, barking sound that I’d heard too many times in our marriage. He felt invincible. He looked at me, the woman he had vowed to love and cherish before God and two hundred witnesses, and saw only an obstacle he was about to crush beneath his Italian leather shoes. He wanted to humiliate me. He needed me to know that leaving him was the biggest mistake of my life.
