He was doing exactly what I’d watched a hundred defendants do. He was emptying the marriage out quietly before he filed, hiding assets so that when the divorce came, there’d be nothing for me to claim and plenty for him to disappear with.
He even said so. Out loud. In voicemails.
Garrett, it turned out, was a sloppy, boastful drunk, and Bianca liked him to narrate his own cleverness. There were voice messages — he’d meant them for her, or for his own ego — where he laughed about “emptying Camille out before the divorce,” where he called me, in that lazy, contemptuous voice, “the useless one.” I listened to every one of them with the strange calm of a professional reviewing evidence, because that’s what they were now. Evidence.
So I did not scream. I did not confront him. I did not hire a divorce attorney and fire off an angry letter, which is what he would have expected, and what he was prepared for.
