Chapter 3
Tessa
I called Miranda Holt's office on Monday morning, three days after Mrs. Thompson had handed me her card. The receptionist gave me an appointment for Wednesday at ten.
I'd taken the weekend to think about it. I'd carried the card in the pocket of my apron through Friday's shift, the Saturday rush, and the Sunday morning crowd, taking it out at the back counter when no one was looking and reading the same six words.
Miranda Holt. Holt & Associates. Family Law.
I had not wanted to call. Some part of me, the part that had been folded smaller and smaller for ten years of marriage, was sure that calling another lawyer was just paying for the same disappointment twice.
I'd hired a lawyer once before. I'd paid a retainer.
I'd told a stranger everything Nicholas had ever done to me and asked him to use it to protect my son.
Within a week, he'd stopped returning my calls.
The file had vanished. Nicholas had known.
I drove to Miranda's office on Wednesday morning the way I drove everywhere now, with both hands on the wheel and my eyes on the rearview at every other block.
What had moved me, in the end, was Mrs. Thompson.
You can't keep running for the rest of his childhood, she'd said.
And: She isn't afraid of rich men. I had thought about both of those sentences for three days.
The second one was the one that mattered.
The first lawyer had been a man Nicholas could buy.
I didn't know yet whether Miranda was someone he couldn't.
And going to her office wasn't the same as deciding. I was going to ask questions. I was going to find out what my options were. Whatever came after that came after.
I parked two blocks down on Meeting Street, fed the meter, and walked.
Holt & Associates was on the second floor of a brick building that had been a bank in the 1920s and had since been chopped into law offices. I climbed the stairs and gave my name to a receptionist who handed me a clipboard and pointed me toward a leather chair.
I filled out forms. My name was on each of them. Natalie St. George née Shaw. I had not signed it on anything but tax forms and a lease in seven months. Putting it down five times in a row, in a brick building on Meeting Street, made my stomach feel hollow in a way the tax forms never had.
Miranda came out fifteen minutes later. She looked to be in her mid-forties. Navy suit cut clean. Dark hair pulled back. The kind of presence that didn't announce itself but was difficult to miss once you registered it.
"Tessa Marin? Miranda Holt. Come on back."
She walked me down the hallway at her own pace. The desk in her office was uncluttered. A legal pad. A pen. Her phone, face down. She gestured me into the chair across from her.
"Mrs. Thompson called me Friday," she said. "She told me enough to expect you. Tell me what's happening."
I told her.
I told her in the order it had happened, and I told her without crying, which was an accomplishment I didn't expect to be proud of.
I had said this out loud exactly twice before—once to a man who took it from me and used it against me, and once to Mrs. Thompson in the back office of the bakery, the afternoon she'd hired me.
Telling it again, out loud, in a room I'd been in for less than fifteen minutes, was harder than I'd thought it would be when I'd rehearsed the conversation in my car.
She listened the way a person listens who has done this a hundred times and has not gotten tired of it.
She wrote nothing down. The first lawyer had taken pages of notes.
Watching Miranda not write made me wait, against my will, for the moment she'd dismiss what I'd said.
She didn't. She let me get all the way through before she said anything, and when I was done, she sat for a long moment with her hands folded on her desk.
Then she walked me through the case.
The bottom line was simple, in the way the worst things were always simple.
South Carolina was Noah's home state by federal law because he'd lived here for over six months.
By about a month. That was the foundation.
Everything we did, Miranda said, would be in service of holding it—because the moment Nicholas found us, he was going to file in his own state and try to drag the case back to his territory.
If he succeeded, we'd be fighting him on his ground, and we'd lose Noah.
A month. We'd cleared the threshold by a month.
I sat with that for longer than I let her see.
Seven months of running and the math came down to thirty days.
If I'd waited another month before I left.
If I'd second-guessed myself on the road and pulled off somewhere for a week to think.
If Noah had gotten a fever and I'd had to stop—we wouldn't have made it.
I'd done the right thing by accident, and by the slimmest margin available to me.
The relief was almost as bad as the fear.
The buried complaint, she said, wasn't gone. Records like that didn't fully delete. A subpoena could recover them. That would be the backbone of the abuse claim.
I let that land. The day I'd filed the complaint had been one of the worst days of my life.
I had walked into the police station with the truth I had been holding for two years, told it to a polite officer, and then watched it disappear within the week.
I had carried it ever since as a thing I had done that didn't work.
Miranda was telling me it had not been a waste.
The day I had been brave enough to file was, it turned out, a thing I had stored on a server somewhere for use by someone like her, all this time later.
She asked one question. "Are you currently in a relationship?"
"No."
Why was she asking that?
She nodded once and moved on. Family courts, she said, looked at the child's environment.
A stable male presence in Noah's life—a partner, a stepfather figure, someone who showed up consistently—counted in a custody analysis.
Especially against a wealthy, articulate father with a credibility advantage.
A single mother fighting alone wasn't a legal disadvantage. Practically, it was.
Oh.
Then she told me what filing would cost.
The day we filed, Nicholas got served. Within a week, he'd have my address, the school's address, and the bakery's.
Everything I'd spent seven months keeping from him would be his within days of us walking into a courthouse.
There were protective measures we could put in place—restraining orders, supervised visitation—but they all lived in a world where he knew where I was.
There was no version of the fight that didn't end the hiding.
Something in my chest started doing the thing it did when I caught the wrong silhouette in a parking lot. I made my hands stay open in my lap.
He'd come, she said. He'd send lawyers first. He'd request visitation with Noah, which the court would consider. I'd sit across tables from his attorneys. I'd, at some point, be in the same room with him.
I could see the room. I could see him in it.
I could see the small, precise smile he'd give the judge, the cuff links, the way he'd lean back in his chair like a man who had nothing to apologize for.
I could feel my body doing what it did when he was within ten feet of me—the shoulders climbing, the breath shortening, the hands that didn't know whether to hide or be visible.
I let out a breath I hadn't known I was holding.
"Tessa." Her voice softened. "I'm not telling you this to discourage you. I'm telling you because if we do this, you have to be all-in. The case won't survive a client who's half-in. I need you to know what you're walking into before you walk into it."
I thought about it. The fight she was describing—measured, deliberate, with a real chance—versus seven more months of the version of my life I'd been living. Then twelve. Then twenty. Either way, I was looking at years. The difference was what I'd have at the end of them.
She walked me through the fees. Her standard retainer for a case like this was fifteen thousand.
She wasn't going to ask me for that. Mrs. Thompson was family to her.
What she needed from me was a working retainer of five hundred dollars, payable however worked for my finances, and full commitment.
The rest she'd carry on the expectation that family courts ordered wealthier spouses to pay the other side's attorney fees in cases like mine.
The bill at the end of this got paid by Nicholas, not me.
I sat there.
The first lawyer had taken his retainer without looking at me.
He had charged what he'd charged because a man like Nicholas was supposed to be the kind of client who paid what you charged.
Miranda was looking at me as if I were a real client, not a mark, and telling me she would carry me until the case made itself worth carrying.
I didn't have a frame for being seen this way by a stranger.
My eyes did the thing they did when I couldn't afford to let them do it. I made them stop.
"Why would you do that?"
She looked at me for a moment, and the lawyer composure softened, briefly, into something that wasn't softer but was older.
"Because I've watched too many men like your husband get away with things like this. And every once in a while, one of them ends up in a courtroom across from me. And those are the cases I take."
I sat there. I had been bracing all morning for the version of this where I'd walk out empty-handed. I had stopped bracing.
The only question left was whether I could sit in a courtroom with him and not come apart.
"Could I have a few days to think about it?"
"Of course. Take what you need."
I nodded. I was holding the arm of the chair harder than I needed to.