Two hundred and eighty dollars, emergency callout. I mention it because that was the last simple thing about any of this.

Garrett called the police at midnight. They came, looked at the deed, and told him it was a civil matter. Then they told me the same thing, which nobody warns you about. He was still a lawful occupant. Married, resident for four years, mail in his name. The locks meant nothing. He had a court order restoring his access within nine days, and I had a contempt warning on my file for the trouble.

I did not go back. I stayed at my sister’s in Bardwell with a nineteen-day-old baby and started a divorce I had to fund while not working.

It took eleven months. The prenup held on the house and the accounts. It did not touch custody, and that was where he fought, because Marguerite told him it was the only leverage he had left. Four hearings. A guardian ad litem. A psychological evaluation I had to sit through at twelve weeks postpartum while a stranger asked whether I had ever felt resentment toward my daughter.

I got primary. He has alternate weekends. He takes them, which surprised me, and he has never once been late, which surprised me more.

Marguerite has not been permitted around Wren since the evaluator’s report, which quoted her saying the baby would have been better off without me. She wrote that down herself, in a questionnaire, believing it helped.

I have my house. I am in it. The nursery is yellow. Wren is four and she asks about her father on Thursdays because Thursdays are when she gets confused about the calendar.

Everyone reads the note on the door and thinks that was the end of it. The note was the easiest minute of the whole year. The rest was paperwork, and money, and a courtroom in February where a man I married described me to a judge as someone who does nothing. What I won was ordinary and slow and cost me thirty-one thousand dollars, and I would do it again, and I would like people to stop calling it satisfying.