I didn’t read the notebook until that night. I knew it was his, and I didn’t want to invade his privacy, but the next morning he left it on the kitchen table and told me I could. Most of the pages were ordinary teenage things: complaints about school, a girl he liked, arguments with his father about grades. But starting in September, the entries became shorter. He wrote about eating dinner alone in his room, being told not to use the living room when his father’s friends were over, and once writing that his father had said, “Maybe your mother should be the one dealing with you again.” Then, three pages before the night he was locked out, there was one sentence that made me stop: “Dad says I’m not supposed to tell Mom about the calls because she’ll make everything worse.”
I asked Owen about the calls, and at first he refused to answer. Then he admitted his father had been receiving messages from someone who kept saying Owen was “becoming a problem.” The messages complained about his grades, the hours he came home, how often he was at my house, and even the fact that he still called me when he was upset. Owen thought his father was getting the messages from someone at school. He didn’t know that the number wasn’t saved in his father’s phone under a name. I asked him whether he’d ever seen the messages himself, and he said yes — once, when his father left his phone on the kitchen counter. He remembered the profile picture because he’d seen the same woman at his father’s house several times.
I recognized the description immediately. It was his father’s girlfriend’s sister, the woman who had been helping with “family matters” since the divorce. I called my attorney before confronting anyone, and we started documenting everything. Then Owen’s stepbrother called again, crying this time, and said he’d found something in his dad’s office that he wasn’t supposed to touch. It was a printed email with Owen’s name at the top and instructions about changing the door code, disabling the garage access, and making sure he didn’t have a key. The email wasn’t from my ex-husband at all. It was from the woman I’d been told had nothing to do with our custody arrangement — and at the bottom, my ex had written three words in reply: “I’ll handle it.”
