“Does my mother hate me?” he asked in a very small voice.
“No,” I said. “Your mother loves you enough to refuse to lie for you. Those are not opposites.”
We sat quietly.
The refrigerator hummed.
Outside, a plow scraped down the street.
“I’ll move out,” he said finally. “I’ll find a short-term place by the fifteenth.”
“Thank you.”
“Can I ask you for one thing?”
I braced myself.
“Can we do this decently? I don’t want it to turn into a war. I don’t want to be someone who fights you over furniture.”
I studied him.
Two weeks earlier, he would have said I’ll do anything, and I would have known better than to trust it.
This time, he had said decently.
Smaller.
Truer.
“Yes,” I said. “We can try.”
“I’ll try,” he said. “And if I fail, I’ll tell you.”
It wasn’t a grand promise.
It was the first honest one he had made me in a year.
I believed it the way you believe a floorboard after testing it.
Mediation happened in late February, in a fourteenth-floor conference room downtown with a long walnut table and a window overlooking a gray, glittering strip of river.
Naomi Brooks sat beside me in a navy suit, her legal pad perfectly squared to the table’s edge.
Across from us sat Daniel and his attorney, a heavyset man named Mr. Halloran who looked prepared for a fight no one had told him wasn’t coming.
Halloran began with a long paragraph about marital assets, “reasonable expectations,” and something he called “equitable positioning,” which sounded like a polite way to say he planned to keep as much as possible.
About two minutes in, Daniel raised a hand.
Chapter 14
