Chapter 11: What Monday Brought
The negotiation took three weeks.
Patricia had warned me it would feel like standing in a hallway — not quite inside anything, not quite free.
She was right.
There were days when the paperwork was the whole world, when the language of asset division and custody schedules and financial disclosure turned everything human into a column of numbers.
But there were also days when I sat in Patricia's office and watched Warren Schell across the table and understood, clearly and without anger, that Daniel had run out of room.
The business account issue had changed everything.
Robert Fenn's civil complaint was moving forward on a separate track, and the exposure it created — the possibility of criminal referral if the DA's office took an interest — had removed Daniel's willingness to fight on every front simultaneously.
He could not afford to be difficult in the divorce while defending himself against Fenn.
He had to choose where to spend his energy.
He chose Fenn.
Which meant he gave Patricia most of what she asked for.
The house came to me.
The primary custody arrangement favored my schedule and the children's school.
The financial settlement included a portion of the business assets calculated before the missing funds — which meant Daniel was paying back twice: once to Fenn, once to me.
Schell tried, once, to renegotiate the custody terms in the final week.
He framed it as Daniel wanting more time with the children, which was possibly even true.
Patricia looked at him across the table.
"Your client is currently managing a civil complaint and potential criminal referral related to financial misconduct.
My client's position is that stability for the children is the priority.
If Mr.
Schell would like to revisit this point, we can do so after the Fenn matter is resolved." She paused.
"In whatever form that resolution takes."
Schell did not revisit the point.
On the last day, Daniel and I sat in the same room for the first time since the night he had left with his bag.
He looked tired in a way that had nothing to do with sleep — the particular exhaustion of a person who has spent weeks being told, by multiple lawyers, exactly how much they have lost.
He signed where he was told to sign.
I signed where I was told to sign.
At the end, Schell and Patricia stepped out to handle the filing paperwork, and Daniel and I were left alone in the conference room for approximately four minutes.
He looked at the table.
Then at me.
"I want you to know," he said, "that I'm going to be different with the kids.
Whatever you think of me — I'm going to be different."
"I hope so," I said.
"I genuinely hope so."
"Do you believe me?"
I thought about it honestly.
"I think you believe yourself," I said.
"That's a start."
He nodded.
He looked like he wanted to say more.
He didn't.
Patricia came back through the door.
"We're done," she said.
We were done.
I shook Schell's hand because Patricia had told me to.
I did not shake Daniel's hand.
We walked out of the building in different directions — him toward the parking garage, me toward the street where Dana was waiting in her car with the engine running and the heat on because it was a cold morning and she had known, without being told, that I would need to go somewhere warm immediately after.
I got in.
She pulled into traffic.
"Done?" she said.
"Done," I said.
She drove for a moment without speaking.
"Where do you want to go?" she said.
I looked out the window at the city moving past — ordinary and indifferent and full of people who had no idea that anything had changed.
"Somewhere with good coffee," I said.
"And no lawyers."
She laughed.
May you like
It was the first time I had heard either of us laugh in three weeks.
It sounded like something opening.
