Mara stood when he sat.
She did not roll her eyes. She did not smirk. She just slid a color-coded pickup calendar across the table.
“This shows who has actually been doing the parenting,” she said.
The judge studied it for a full minute.
Then he looked at Nadia and asked who had taken Maya to the dentist the month before.
Nadia blinked.
“I think maybe me? I’d have to check.”
I didn’t say a word.
It was me. It had been me. Maya got a cavity filled and I spent the afternoon in a molded plastic chair watching Tate watch dump trucks on YouTube with the sound too loud.
Five minutes later, the judge ruled the children would remain primarily with me during school days due to continuity of schedule. Nadia would get Thursdays and alternating weekends pending the broader property and divorce proceedings.
It wasn’t full victory.
It was oxygen.
I exhaled for what felt like the first time in three months.
Mara touched my arm under the table once. No smile. Just confirmation.
We walked into the hallway after, and before we made it to the elevator, Landon brushed my shoulder.
“This won’t stand,” he said.
Real low. Like he thought threat and intimacy were the same thing.
I looked down at his boots.
Scuffed. Bad laces. Mud dried in the creases.
That’s the only reason I didn’t say what was in my mouth.
Instead, I turned to Mara and said, “Let’s go.”
Back at the apartment that evening, Maya asked if she could hang her soccer medal on the wall above her bed.
I stood on a kitchen chair while she pointed.
“A little higher,” she said.
“Here?”
“No, there. Perfect.”
That night, for the first time in weeks, I really slept.
Not dozed.
Not drifted with one ear open.
Slept.
Then two days later I walked outside and found a deep angry line carved all the way down the side of my truck.
Fender to tailgate.
I took seven photos.
Different angles. Different light. Time-stamped them all.
Filed the police report. Replaced the handle they’d yanked half off for forty-eight bucks at a junkyard on Sprague. Didn’t claim it on insurance because I didn’t want anyone saying I couldn’t maintain my own vehicle.
Mara looked at the photos and said, “Add it to the file. No reaction. Let them keep stepping in their own mess.”
So I did.
Summer dragged.
The property hearing was set for August sixth, and every week between May and August felt twice as long as the last. I held the line.
Lunches. School. Work. Gas receipts. Library books. Ice cream on curbs outside 7-Eleven because sometimes children need an ordinary Tuesday more than they need another conversation about why adults are bad at love.
Then the note came.
Last Thursday in June. Hot as hell. Sun dragging low but still mean. I was carrying groceries up the apartment stairs when I saw it taped to the door.
No name. Just black block letters.
Meet me. 8:30 p.m. Harold’s on Trent. Come alone.
I stood there with a gallon of milk sweating through the bag and looked at the handwriting.
Something in my gut said Landon.
I almost tore it up.
Instead, I put the groceries away, told the sitter I’d be back in two hours, and drove to Harold’s.
It was the kind of diner that still had ashtrays on the tables even though no one smoked there anymore. Cracked booths. Chrome legs. Coffee strong enough to take rust off bolts. I slid into a booth in the back. The waitress brought coffee without asking because regularity is one of the last forms of mercy left in the world.
