My Wife Burned My Son’s Last Memory of His Mom — Then Told Us to Leave “Her” House
Chapter 10
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I mailed the letter after dropping him off. Priya's office had located a business mailing address for Garrett that was publicly listed, so I sent it there with no note from me. Then I returned to the hotel and sat at the table with the damaged compass six feet away.I wondered what a thirteen-year-old says to the man involved with the woman who burned the last handwritten thing he had from his mother. Whatever Owen had written, he had identified one part of an adult mess that he could address directly: he could not control Rebecca; he could not reverse the fire; he could decide what Garrett needed to hear from him. That was how Owen operated: when something overwhelmed him, he reduced it until he found one thing that could still be acted on—a diagram, a letter, a fact.Three weeks after the fire, our first major hearing was scheduled for a Tuesday morning. By then, the hotel no longer felt like a hotel every second: Owen's replacement field bag hung from the coat hook beside the door; his cereal lived on top of the kitchenette refrigerator; we had bought two cheap ceramic mugs because the paper ones irritated me; the damaged compass remained on the window ledge, and the housekeeping staff had learned not to move it; our toothbrushes had assigned sides of the sink. Temporary life had developed infrastructure. We had stopped talking about how many nights we had been there.Priya spent the week before the hearing preparing for Rebecca's challenge to the financial restrictions. Her lawyer filed two motions describing the order as unnecessarily broad and financially coercive: they argued that Rebecca had not tried to hide assets, that she remained entitled to use marital money, and that the attempted transfer was being portrayed more suspiciously than it deserved.None of those arguments was ridiculous; that was important for me to understand. Courtrooms are rarely rooms where one person speaks sense and the other babbles nonsense: Rebecca's attorney had a job, and there were legitimate questions about proportion. But every argument still had to coexist with the video of Rebecca pouring lighter fluid onto a thirteen-year-old's belongings, and four days later attempting to transfer $38,000.Priya told me that clear facts did not need theatrical decoration. I wore a charcoal suit to court that Tuesday, one I had retrieved from the house with a police standby arranged through our attorneys, because neither Priya nor I wanted direct confrontation.Sitting outside the courtroom, I tried to decide what kind of man I wanted Owen to hear about later if he ever asked what I had done there: I did not want revenge recorded in the transcript; I did not want to punish Rebecca for falling out of love with me. People were allowed to leave marriages; they were even allowed to leave badly. I wanted to present facts, protect my son, protect the property until it could be divided fairly, and walk out without turning pain into a performance.