The custody hearing had already become a nightmare. Daniel’s attorney had taken months of dizziness, blackouts, emergency room visits, and unexplained exhaustion and turned them into proof that I was unstable. Because several doctors had failed to give me a definite diagnosis, Daniel argued that there was nothing physically wrong with me at all. Patricia, his mother, sat behind him nodding as if every frightening moment I had lived through was simply another performance she had finally caught me staging.
What made it worse was that I had come to court alone. My attorney had withdrawn two weeks earlier after Daniel emptied our joint account and I could no longer keep up with the retainer payments. I had spent that morning trying to explain why our seven-year-old daughter, Lily, cried before going to Daniel’s house and why she had started hiding her backpack on transition days. Every time I tried to describe Lily’s fear, Daniel’s lawyer objected, and every objection made me feel as if my own child were slowly disappearing behind legal words I could not fight.
