I did not raise my voice. I asked Douglas to hand me the top folder, and he did, because men like Douglas have never once been told no by a woman in a uniform. Inside was a petition for emergency custody of Owen, filed three days earlier, listing my address as an unstable environment. Attached to it was a document I had never seen: a quitclaim deed, my name typed at the top, a signature line waiting. They needed the house out of the equation. A single mother living rent-free with a sister who deployed looked like chaos in a courtroom. A single mother with no residence at all looked like something worse.
Nadia had not been crying because they were rude to her. She had been crying because Marguerite had told her, calmly, over my coffee, that if she signed nothing and fought, they would spend whatever it took, and that Grant would say she left. I told them both to get out. Douglas said something about how I did not understand how these things worked. I said I understood trespassing, and that my body camera footage from the porch was already backed up, which was not true yet but became true eleven minutes later.
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