He had found this approach unsatisfying.
“Mr. Dalton,” Judge Whitmore said, “you’ve been quiet this morning. Is there anything you’d like to say?”
Miguel gave me the small look we had agreed on.
“No, Your Honor,” I said. “Not at this time.”
Hartwell was already moving. “Your Honor, I think Mr. Dalton’s silence speaks to his situation. He knows he cannot adequately provide for his daughter—”
“Mr. Hartwell.”
The judge did not raise her voice. She did not need to. The room snapped to attention around the two words the way a room does when the person who controls it decides to exercise that control.
“I did not invite your interpretation of Mr. Dalton’s response. He answered a question I asked.”
“Of course. My apologies, Your Honor.”
He sat down smiling.
I want to explain, before I explain what happened next, what brought me to courtroom 4B in a Walmart shirt with $1,947 in monthly income and a public defender, because the picture that Hartwell painted for the gallery was not a lie, exactly. It was a true picture of one period of my life, stripped of every circumstance that would explain how I came to be in it.
Eighteen months earlier, I had walked into my bedroom on a Wednesday afternoon and found my wife of six years with her employer, Richard Crane, in a situation that required no interpretation. I stood in the doorway for a moment. Jessica looked at me with the specific expression of someone who has been caught but has already decided how to handle it, which is a different expression from guilt or shame. She had decided. I could see the decision in her face.
She wanted the house. She wanted primary custody. She wanted me to understand that Richard Crane retained attorneys at a firm that had seventeen partners and an address in the building with the reflective glass exterior downtown.
