“No.”
“Promise?”
“I promise.”
“What if a judge says I have to?”
“I will fight.”
“What if Dad wants Leah instead?”
That question came repeatedly.
I refused to lie.
“Your dad loves you.”
“But does he want me?”
I hated Darius for making a seven-year-old understand the distinction.
Simone surprised me.
She did not become my enemy.
Not entirely.
At our first formal mediation, she arrived with her attorney and sat across from me.
Darius sat beside her.
That image nearly broke my composure.
Not because I believed they were sleeping together.
By then, both insisted they were not.
But because the arrangement looked like a family.
Darius.
Simone.
Leah.
Three people genetically connected.
I sat beside Caleb.
The child Darius now described in court filings as
“non-biological but emotionally significant.”
When my attorney, Rachel, read that phrase aloud, I felt physically sick.
“He approved this wording?”
Rachel nodded.
“Yes.”
