Renee's Move
The preliminary custody hearing was, in Ryan's words afterward, the worst four hours of his adult life — not because the judge seemed inclined to believe Renee's version of events, but because her attorney was skilled enough to make Ryan's travel schedule sound, out loud, in a room full of strangers, like genuine parental negligence.
"He was gone eleven nights last month," the attorney said, reading from a printed calendar like it was a rap sheet. "Eleven nights this active, hands-on stepmother was solely responsible for a six-year-old, without adequate support, without a break, without so much as a check-in call some evenings, according to his own phone records."
It didn't matter, in that moment, that most of us in the room knew exactly what kind of "hands-on" care Renee had actually been providing during those eleven nights. The hearing ended without a ruling, a follow-up date set six weeks out, and a temporary arrangement that let Nora stay with me and Ryan but required a joint custody evaluation before anything became permanent.
Carol Henderson had agreed, reluctantly, to give a formal deposition the following week — the piece of evidence our lawyer said could turn the entire case.
Renee's own lawyer must have known that too, because two days before the scheduled deposition, Renee's rented apartment came back empty. Neighbors said a moving truck had come at night. Her new employer — she'd quietly picked up hostess shifts at a different restaurant weeks earlier, we later learned — said she'd simply stopped showing up.
Our family lawyer didn't sugarcoat what that meant.
"A person who runs before a deposition," she said, "is a person who knows exactly what that deposition would have proven."