In the specific, resilient way young children sometimes are.
More disturbed by adults’ reactions than by their own experience.
“She was very clear,” Naomi told me quietly, once Josie was occupied with a coloring book in the corner. “Consistent details across multiple questions asked different ways. That matters a great deal in these evaluations.”
“What happens now?”
“We open a formal investigation into your wife,” she said. “I’d strongly recommend a temporary safety plan in the meantime — she doesn’t have unsupervised contact with Josie while this proceeds.”
I called a family attorney that same evening.
A measured, direct woman named Beatrice Solano.
She filed for an emergency protective order within forty-eight hours.
Granted the same week.
Barring Miriam from the house and from any contact with Josie pending the outcome of both the investigation and the divorce I’d already decided, somewhere around hour three of that first sleepless night, I was going to file.
I filed the divorce paperwork myself, in person, nine days later, sitting in a courthouse hallway with Beatrice beside me, my hands steady in a way that surprised me at the time.
I’d expected to feel something enormous, signing the end of a marriage I’d believed, only two weeks earlier, was going to be the second real love story of my life.
Instead I mostly felt relief, plain and uncomplicated, the specific relief of finally acting on something my body had apparently understood before my conscious mind fully caught up to it.
“Most people cry doing this,” Beatrice said quietly, watching me sign the last page.
“I think I used up all of that already,” I told her. “Somewhere around hour three.”
She called me eleven times over the following week.
