He self-reported to the board. Not a defense, not a negotiation through counsel — he called them himself on the fifth day and filed a written account, and then he sent a letter to my attorney asking whether I would be willing to receive an apology in writing. My lawyer said in thirty-one years she has watched people fight these to the last dollar and she has never once seen anyone walk into the building voluntarily.
The letter came in June. Four pages. He wrote that my mother-in-law had come to him in February with a folder already assembled — printouts, dates, a chronology — and had told him she’d already spoken to two other clinicians who wouldn’t help. He wrote that he’d told himself the interview line was a formatting convention because everything else in the report was based on real material. Then he wrote a sentence I’ve read more times than I’d like to admit: that he had been doing this for twenty-six years and that the first time you write down a session that didn’t happen, you find out what you actually are.
What it did to the case was total. Her attorney withdrew in July. The custody petition was dismissed in September with a finding on the record about the report, and the judge said a paragraph about it that my lawyer had transcribed and emailed me before I’d left the parking lot. My husband has not spoken to his mother since the day the letter arrived, and he has not once discussed it with me, and I have decided that’s his to carry at his own speed.
She still sends things to the children. Cards, mostly. A parcel at Christmas that sat in my hallway for nine days before my husband took it back to the post office himself. My daughter is eight and asks about her sometimes and I say she lives far away now, which is true, and is going to have to be enough for a few more years. The report is in a box in my closet under some winter things. I don’t take it out. I just know it’s there, eleven pages, with a date on it that I can prove I spent in Denver.
