Marisol Quade was not charged. She was two years qualified and she signed things she was given, which is exactly what she was hired for, and she testified for eleven hours over two days and she was, by everybody's account including mine, completely truthful.
I have never spoken to her. She wrote to me once, in the November. Four lines. The last one says she thinks about the folder.
The custody instrument was declared void in about nine minutes at the first hearing. The judge asked Caspian's attorney one question about the statutory waiting period and then asked whether anybody wished to be heard further.
I have sole custody. Caspian has supervised contact that he has used eleven times in two years.
The two hundred thousand dollars was never paid and I never asked for it and it would have come out of a trust account anyway.
Wilder and Arlo are two.
They are enormous and they are loud and Arlo has a thing about drains that I do not fully understand. They have been to see their grandmother twice with a supervisor present because a judge said they could and because I did not fight it, and both visits were fine, and I have no plans for a third.
I work for a property management firm in Hadley Vale that is not Thackery Row. I run the trust accounts.
The reconciliation is signed by me on the third working day of every month and my employer has asked me twice whether I would consider being less thorough about it, both times as a joke, and both times I have said no.
Sign it. Everyone's here.
Adelaide Thackery said that to me with my own handbag in her hand and a leather folder on my lap, three days after surgery, in a hospital, in front of twenty-two members of her own family.
She said everyone's here as a threat. That is what she meant by it. Look at how many of us there are and look at how alone you are.
And she was right about the count.
Twenty-two witnesses, a nurse who would not leave, a social worker in the doorway with a lanyard, and a camera in the corner by the ceiling.
I have thought about it a great deal and I do not think that woman did one single thing wrong that day except one.
