Chapter 2 - The Folder
The attorney I called was named Dana Ferris, recommended by a former colleague from my litigation support days who had, coincidentally, gone through her own difficult divorce two years earlier and still spoke about Dana with the specific, grateful loyalty of someone who felt genuinely protected by her lawyer.
"Tell me everything," Dana said, in our first meeting, sliding a legal pad across her desk. "Don't summarize. I want details — dates, specifics, anything you've documented."
I opened the folder I'd been quietly building for months — the Charleston hotel confirmation, printed credit card statements showing dinners and gifts I hadn't been present for, a scattered handful of texts I'd glimpsed accidentally on a shared family tablet Nathan had forgotten to log out of.
Dana went through it methodically, making notes, occasionally asking clarifying questions with the same careful precision I remembered using myself, years earlier, organizing evidence for attorneys who depended on exactly this kind of thoroughness.
"This is a good start," she said finally. "For the divorce itself, infidelity matters less in our state than people assume — we're a no-fault jurisdiction, so his affair alone won't dramatically change asset division. But it becomes very relevant for custody and parenting time, particularly if his judgment around introducing Brooke to Lila becomes a pattern, especially against Lila's expressed wishes."
"There's a temporary parenting order," I said. "It requires him to respect Lila's preferences about romantic partners at her events, while the divorce is pending."
"Has he violated that order?"
I thought about the recital, still three weeks away at that point in our timeline, though I didn't yet know how directly it would come to matter. "Not yet," I said. "But I have a feeling he will."
Dana made a note. "If he does, document it immediately. Photos, timestamps, witnesses if possible. Courts take violations of parenting orders seriously, especially when a child has clearly and repeatedly expressed a preference that's being ignored."
I left that meeting with a clearer sense of the road ahead than I'd had in months — not easier, exactly, but at least legible, mapped, navigable in a way the previous year of quiet uncertainty had never allowed.
The temporary parenting order, once finalized two weeks later, spelled out clearly what Dana had described: Nathan retained his scheduled parenting time, but any romantic partner's presence at Lila's extracurricular activities required Lila's expressed comfort, given her age and the pending nature of the case.
Lila herself, when Dana's office gently, carefully asked her preference through a court-appointed child specialist, had been unambiguous. She loved her father. She wanted him at her recitals, her school events, her soccer games. She did not want Brooke there — not out of any complicated custody strategy on my part, but simply because, as the specialist's report noted, quoting Lila directly, "It makes it feel like she's trying to be there instead of Mom, and I don't want that yet. Maybe not ever."
May you like
I read that line in the specialist's report and had to set it down for a moment, feeling something between heartbreak and fierce, protective pride in my daughter's own clear, unforced honesty — the same honesty I was slowly, carefully, learning to reclaim in myself.
Nathan had received the same report. He'd read the same line. And three weeks later, at Lila's recital, he had brought Brooke anyway.
