en minutes into my own divorce hearing, my husband stood up in a half-empty courtroom in Cedar Hollow, Missouri, and laughed at me.
Not a nervous laugh. Not the kind of laugh a person lets out when a room gets too quiet and they don’t know what else to do with their face. This was a practiced laugh, the kind Tobiah used on opposing counsel when he wanted a jury to think a claim was too silly to take seriously. He used to tell me that laugh was worth more than any objection. Loud enough to carry. Short enough to look effortless. Aimed straight at whoever he needed small.
That morning it was aimed at me.
The Route County courthouse in Cedar Hollow isn’t much to look at. Two stories of limestone the color of old teeth, a courtroom that still has the original 1940s ceiling fans turning slow overhead, and a radiator that clanks every few minutes no matter the season. I’d sat in that same courtroom as a girl, waiting on my father while he fought a boundary dispute with a neighbor over a fence line. I never imagined I’d be sitting in it again as a grown woman, fighting to keep the very thing that fence line was supposed to protect.
Judge Halloway had been on the bench in Route County for almost twenty years, a woman with silver hair cut close and a reputation, Barnaby told me beforehand, for reading every single page of every single filing before she ever opened her mouth. She wasn’t the kind of judge who let a courtroom run itself on performance. That was going to matter more than I understood at the time.
He stood at the petitioner’s table in a gray suit I had picked out for him three Christmases ago, one hand resting on a stack of papers he’d highlighted like he was still cramming for the bar exam, and he asked Judge Halloway for half of everything I owned. Not half of the house. Not half of the truck or the furniture or the two accounts we’d built together over eleven years of marriage. He wanted half of Buckhalter Custom Woodworks, the shop I had built out of my father’s old hay barn with my own two hands, and half of the twelve acres my father left me the year before I ever met Tobiah, back when I was twenty-six and still sanding tabletops by hand because I couldn’t afford a planer.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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