Nathan promising her a new apartment in the city. Nathan saying the court would “understand optics once the dust settles.” Nathan referring to “a household the judge can trust.” Nathan telling her not to worry, that by spring everything would look “cleaner.”
Cleaner.
Like he was staging a room.
My stomach dropped so hard I felt it in my knees.
“I didn’t know what he was doing,” Brooke said quietly. “Not fully. I knew he was selfish. I didn’t know he was… strategic.”
I flipped through more messages. Enough to show intent. Enough to reveal that he had imagined a future where Brooke and her unborn child were set pieces in his argument for fatherhood.
Something cold moved through me then, and it wasn’t grief anymore.
It was clarity becoming final.
I looked up. “Why are you giving me this?”
Brooke held my gaze. “Because he lied to both of us. And because I’m not going to testify for him.”
There was no friendship in that moment. No alliance with pretty music under it. Just two women sitting across from each other in a coffee shop, both staring at the shape one man’s vanity had made out of our lives.
I stood.
“I won’t thank you,” I said.
“I know.”
“But I will use it.”
She nodded. “I hoped you would.”
When I got back to Sandra’s office, she read the screenshots and let out a long breath through her nose.
“Well,” she said, “that is an unusually stupid thing for a wealthy man to put in writing.”
The week of the hearing arrived in hard, bright cold. Nora developed a talent for sleeping only in forty-minute bursts unless she was on my chest. I learned how to draft timelines with one hand while bouncing her gently with the other. My hair lived in a clip. My body still felt like borrowed architecture.
The night before court, I laid out my clothes on the back of the bedroom chair: charcoal dress, black pumps, silver studs. I packed bottles for Roz, who would keep Nora during the hearing. I checked the folder Sandra wanted me to bring even though she already had copies of everything. Then I stood in the tiny kitchen of my apartment and looked around.
Lamp glow on the counter. Drying rack full of baby bottles. The river beyond the window, black and quiet. My whole life had been reduced and rebuilt in rooms smaller than the pantry of my old house.
And somehow, standing there, I didn’t feel reduced at all.