He was shown the letter, asked whether he recognized the handwriting, and said yes. Then he was asked when he had first told his mother about the affair, and there was a pause that went on long enough that the judge asked him if he needed a moment, and he said no. He said November 2018. He said his mother had told him to end it and to say nothing, and that he had done one of those two things.
Her attorney tried to walk it back on redirect and made it worse, because every question he asked put another month between what she’d known and what she’d sworn to. She had dated my instability to the week I found out. Her own letter apologized for the year she’d spent watching me not know. The judge said one sentence about that from the bench which my lawyer wrote down verbatim and read to me twice in the hallway.
The petition was denied. There’s a finding on the record about credibility that follows her into anything she files in that county for the rest of her life. She has not tried to contact the children since December. My husband — he’s still that, technically, the divorce runs into next spring — sat in the parking lot for forty minutes afterward and then came to the door and said he’d testified because it was true and not because it helped me, and I said I’d take it either way, and he said that was fair.
I don’t know what happens with him yet. That’s a separate thing with its own timeline and I’ve stopped forecasting it. What I know is that a woman wrote me two honest pages in October 2019 when she thought nobody would ever read them, and that I kept them for six years out of some instinct I couldn’t have explained at the time. My daughter asked me last month why I saved it. I told her the truth: because on the day it came, it was the only proof I had that I wasn’t imagining any of it.
