Carolyn filed Monday morning.
Not a response to Marcus’s paperwork. He had not filed anything yet. Dara had been bluffing.
We filed first.
The complaint included a claim for divorce on the grounds of marital misconduct, a motion to freeze joint assets pending equitable distribution, a detailed accounting of marital funds used to purchase and maintain the Mooresville property, and a formal request for the court to consider dissipation of marital assets in the final settlement calculation.
In North Carolina, when a spouse uses shared money to fund a secret household, a judge can take that into account. Carolyn had been practicing family law for twenty-three years and she was precise and she was fast and she did not waste a single word.
Marcus was served at his Mooresville house on Tuesday at 11:20 in the morning.
Dominic called me that evening.
“Dad called me,” he said. “He’s saying you ambushed him.”
I told Dominic I would not speak against his father to him directly. I told him I would let the court documents speak, and that whenever he was ready to see them, I would make them available.
He was quiet for a moment.
“Mom,” he said. “Did you know about all of this for a long time?”
“Eight weeks,” I told him.
Another silence.
“Are you okay?”
I told him I was getting there.
Leah stopped speaking to Marcus the day she read the PI report. I did not ask her to do that. It was her choice, and I told her that whatever relationship she wanted with her father going forward was between the two of them.
She said, “He has a son, Mom. A five-year-old. While we were renewing your vows.”
I did not have an answer for that.
Marcus hired an attorney out of Huntersville. He countered that the Mooresville property had been purchased with funds from a private investment account that predated our marriage.
Carolyn asked for documentation.
The documentation showed the account had been opened in 1996, before we married, and had held around forty thousand dollars at that time. But in 2017 Marcus had deposited a combined total of ninety-three thousand dollars from our joint savings into that account before using it to make the down payment in Mooresville. He had transferred the money in four separate installments over seven months, each one just below the threshold that would have triggered an automatic bank notification.
He had been careful.
He had not been careful enough.
The judge presiding over our case was a woman named the Honorable Margaret Theis. She had been on the Mecklenburg County bench for eleven years.
At our equitable distribution hearing in January, she looked at the transfer documentation for a long time without speaking.
Then she asked Marcus’s attorney to explain why his client had felt it necessary to move marital funds into a separate account in four installments rather than one.
Marcus’s attorney said his client had done so for personal financial planning reasons.
Judge Theis looked at him over the top of her glasses and did not say anything for several seconds.
The final order awarded me the Charlotte house outright. It awarded me fifty-eight percent of all remaining marital assets, citing dissipation. It awarded me a lump-sum payment of one hundred and fourteen thousand dollars representing the court’s assessment of the marital funds Marcus had diverted.
Dara had retained her own attorney by that point, expecting Marcus to deed her the Mooresville property free and clear.
That did not happen.
Marcus did not have the liquid assets to both comply with the court order and maintain the Mooresville mortgage. He put the house on the market in February.
I am told she moved out before the listing went live.
I do not know where she is now and I have not tried to find out.
I know that Eli exists. I think about that a lot. He is five years old and none of this is his fault and I hope someone is taking care of him properly. That is as far as I have gotten with that.
I stayed in the Charlotte house. I planted tulip bulbs along the front walk in November because I had been meaning to do it for three years and I finally had the quiet to do it.
Dominic came home for Christmas. He and I sat on the back porch on December 26th with coffee when it was about thirty-eight degrees, and we did not talk about Marcus at all. We talked about his job and a girl he is seeing in Raleigh and a road trip he wants to take in the spring.
Leah called on New Year’s Eve and stayed on the phone with me until after midnight.
I did not make a resolution.
I just sat in my kitchen in the house that is mine, listening to the neighborhood get quiet, and I thought about how long I had been performing contentment for someone who was not watching.
I am not performing anything anymore.
That is enough for now.
