Harrison came out half an hour later, convinced he had won another argument by wearing me down. At eleven o’clock, I left the children with my neighbor Sarah for forty minutes.
I put on a navy blazer, took a folder from the bottom drawer of my desk, and drove the small sedan we almost never used to a notary’s office in Beverly Hills. Inside the folder were the deeds to the house, which was a home in the hills of Brentwood that my father had given me five years before I got married with an express clause stating it was my separate property.
I didn’t scream and I didn’t call Tiffany. Sitting across from the notary, I said in a firm voice that I wanted to put the house up for sale that very day.
That same afternoon, when Harrison arrived and saw a real estate agent photographing the living room, the color drained from his face. The agent’s name was Monica James, and she arrived with an efficient energy that contrasted sharply with the thick silence of the house.