The forensic trail was clean enough that Eric’s attorney didn’t even attempt to contest the numbers, only the interpretation of them, which didn’t move the judge much once structured transfers 11 weeks prior to the birth of triplets was read into the record in a flat procedural voice that made the deliberateness of it somehow louder than if I’d shouted it myself.

Eric lost his job three weeks later, not because of the divorce directly, but because his employer’s HR department received an anonymous tip, not from me, not from Deborah, and Naomi swears it wasn’t her.

Though, I have my suspicions about a produce logistics coordinator with a lot of free time and a personal grudge about the company card being used for a portion of the Cabo trip’s bar tab.

An internal audit confirmed it.

He was let go for cause.

It’s been 11 months.

The girls are walking now, Zoe first, by about 2 weeks, which Naomi’s spreadsheet still tracks out of habit more than necessity.

Deborah comes over every Sunday and has never once in 11 months missed a visit or been anything less than the woman who showed up with a folder and a business card when I didn’t know I needed either.

I don’t feel triumphant exactly. I don’t think this is a triumphant kind of story.

I feel something closer to steady.

The particular calm of a person who spent 6 days believing she’d been left to drown and then found out slowly in loops of documentation and disbelief that she’d actually been building a case the entire time without knowing that’s what the coffee and the spreadsheet and the folder were for.

Eric sees the girls twice a week, supervised, in a family services office with fluorescent lighting and a box of toys in the corner that always looks slightly too new, like nobody stays long enough to wear them down.

I don’t ask him how it feels.

I stopped being curious about his interior life somewhere around the six transfer bank statement.

Deborah asked me once a few months ago whether I’d forgiven him.

“I don’t think that’s the question,” I told her. “I think the question is whether I’d let him do it again, and the answer to that one’s easy.”

She nodded like that was the right answer because it was the same one she’d have given.

The kid-free Finina is gone now, deactivated sometime after the HR investigation. Though Naomi still has every post archived, timestamped, sorted by date in a folder she says she’s never deleting just in case.

I used to think that was excessive.

I don’t anymore.

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