Preston’s lead attorney, Martin Voss, stood up slowly, smoothing the front of his thousand-dollar suit jacket with practiced theatrical ease.
“Your Honor, we are deeply concerned that proceeding without licensed counsel may create unnecessary complications and waste this court’s valuable time,” Voss said, his smooth baritone dripping with condescension.
“This is, after all, a fairly straightforward matter of enforcing a routine, pre-negotiated marital separation agreement.”
Straightforward.
That word almost made me smile a bitter, razor-sharp smile.
Because Preston’s family had used that exact word to describe erasing seven years of my life, my labor, and my dignity.
Three weeks earlier, Preston had placed seventy pages of divorce papers beside my breakfast plate like he was casually leaving a restaurant receipt on a café table.
There was no apology in his eyes.
There was no sorrow or explanation in his posture.
There was just a dense stack of legal instruments reducing our entire marriage to clinical clauses, zeroed-out bank schedules, and fraudulent financial calculations.
