“Were you aware of this information?”
There was a beat. I could feel Miguel beside me deciding how to answer a question that had more than one true answer.
“I was aware that Mr. Dalton had advised me that the full financial picture would be presented at the appropriate time,” he said. “The specifics were not shared with me in advance.”
The judge nodded once, in the way that acknowledges an answer without fully accepting it.
She called a recess.
In the corridor, Miguel walked with me to the water fountain at the far end, where no one else was standing, and he kept his voice very level.
“You want to explain to me,” he said, “what just happened in there.”
“I told you to wait for the question.”
“You told me to wait for a question. You did not tell me the question was going to change the entire nature of the proceeding.”
“I didn’t know exactly when it would come,” I said. “I knew it would come.”
He looked at me for a long moment.
“Twenty-three million dollars,” he said.
“Four hundred thousand, give or take, after the structure.”
He looked at the ceiling, then back at me.
“Vincent,” he said. “I have spent three weeks preparing to minimize your losses in a custody case we were almost certainly going to lose.”
“I know.”
“And you spent those three weeks doing what, exactly?”
“Waiting,” I said. “And letting them build the version of me they wanted to build. The more certain they were about what I was, the less they were going to look for what I actually was.”
He was quiet for a moment.
“Your daughter,” he said. “Emma.”
“Yes.”
“What do you want for Emma?”
