The pharmacist smiled at me. “Almost time, huh?”
“Feels like it.”
She rang everything up. I handed over my card.
Declined.
I frowned. “That’s weird.”
I tried another card.
Declined.
The woman behind me in line suddenly became deeply interested in her gum display.
Heat climbed up my neck. I paid in cash from the emergency twenty-dollar bill I kept in my wallet and took the paper bag with hands that felt clumsy and huge.
In the car, I sat with the engine off and called the bank.
The joint accounts had been frozen.
All of them.
Insurance float. Household operating money. The account our medical bills auto-drafted from. Every dollar I touched in the visible life Nathan had built for us had just been put behind glass.
I called Sandra from the parking lot with my seatbelt still hanging loose against my shoulder.
“He froze everything.”
“Of course he did,” she said, already moving. I could hear papers shifting. “I’ll file emergency relief this afternoon.”
I pressed the heel of my hand against my eyes.
The humiliation at the pharmacy wasn’t really about vitamins. It was about the message. Nathan wasn’t just angry. He wanted me reminded, publicly and efficiently, that access had always flowed through him.
That same evening, Sandra had the emergency filing drafted.
By Monday, Gerald filed back.
His motion landed in my inbox at 4:17 p.m.
Emergency request for psychological evaluation of petitioner.
I read the title twice because my brain refused to accept how nakedly ugly it was.
Then I kept reading and realized something even worse.
He wasn’t calling me crazy in a sloppy way.
He was doing it elegantly.
My documentation became obsessive surveillance. My financial preparation became erratic secrecy. My professional precision became evidence of paranoid overreach. Every strength I had used to protect myself had been translated into pathology.
By the time I reached the last page, my hands were shaking.
He had taken the best thing about me—my ability to see clearly—and filed it as proof that I was unstable.
And for the first time since I found the charges, I was no longer angry first.
I was scared.
Part 5
Sandra told me to come to her office immediately, which I did in leggings, a black sweater, and the kind of swollen-eyed face no woman wants to bring into a legal strategy meeting.
She read Gerald’s motion once, slow and expressionless, then set it down and leaned back in her chair.