“Emma,” Brenda said. No hello. No how are you. No how’s the baby. “You need to pay Tyler’s tuition. The fall payment’s due.”
Her voice had the same impatient confidence she used when she asked me to pass the salt.
“No,” I said.
She let out a sharp breath.
“Whatever problem you have with Thomas has nothing to do with my son.”
Across the desk, Amanda held up one finger. Let her keep going.
“The school’s threatening to suspend his enrollment, Emma,” Brenda said. “You can’t punish a child because your marriage failed.”
The cruelty of that sentence was almost elegant.
She’d helped break my marriage. She’d called my pregnancy a trick. She’d watched me walk out of her mother’s house with tears running down my face.
And now she was using her fourteen-year-old son to turn my boundary into a moral failure.
“I didn’t enroll Tyler at St. Mark’s,” I said. “I didn’t sign a legal agreement to pay his tuition.”
“You agreed to support this family. We all heard you say it.”
Amanda started writing on her legal pad.
“Did Thomas tell you I hired a lawyer, Brenda?” I asked.
The line went quiet.
When Brenda spoke again, her voice had changed. Lower.
“You don’t have proof of anything.”
Amanda reached into her folder. She took out a formal document. An evidence preservation notice, on her firm’s letterhead. She set it on the desk. Right next to my twelve-week ultrasound photo.
“Actually,” Amanda said. Loud enough for Brenda to hear. “We have quite a bit more than she knows.”
A chair scraped on the other end.
Then Thomas grabbed the phone.
“Emma. Stop this. Before you destroy the whole family.”
Amanda’s pen froze.
I looked at her across the desk.
There it was again. Not an apology. Not one question about our baby. Just a warning. Like my refusal to keep paying for everything was the destructive act.
“Which family, Thomas?” I asked. “The one that watched me leave?”
“You walked out.”
“After you asked me for a divorce.”
“I was angry. Brenda was pushing me. You know how she gets.”
Across the desk, Amanda wrote three words on her yellow legal pad and turned it around so I could see.
KEEP HIM TALKING.
“So Brenda made you ask your pregnant wife for a divorce?” I said.
“I didn’t know you were pregnant!”
“You knew after I showed you the lab orders. And the onesie.”
He lowered his voice.
“And then you left anyway.”
For a moment, I almost laughed.
In Thomas’s version of things, everything started with somebody else’s mistake. And ended with my responsibility.
Ethan Blake is a skilled Creative Content Specialist with a talent for crafting engaging and thought-provoking narratives. With a strong background in storytelling and digital content creation, Ethan brings a unique perspective to his role at TheArchivists, where he curates and produces captivating content for a global audience.
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