Dad + Me
“Morgan,” Derek said, without lifting his eyes from the page, “who is M. Ellis?”
She didn’t answer right away. The empty living room held the question the way an empty church holds a cough. Afternoon light came through the tall windows Richard had framed himself and lay in long gold bars across the bare white oak.
“That’s me,” Morgan said. “It’s my middle initial. Ellis is my mother’s name.”
“Then why does it say you ordered a market analysis of this house on the fourteenth of March?”
“Derek…”
“That’s three months before the wedding.” He turned the page. His hands were shaking so badly the paper rattled. “And this handwriting is Gavin’s. I know it. He writes his sevens with a bar.”
He looked up at his wife then. I stood in the kitchen doorway, with my coat still on and my keys still in my hand, and I watched my son’s face do something I had seen on a hundred witness stands. It stopped hoping.
I should tell you who I am, because for six months Morgan had a version of me, and it was short.
My name is Wendy Finch. I’m sixty-eight. I spent thirty-one years as a family court judge in Black Hawk County, Iowa, which means I listened to people argue about love, money, and property from a raised chair. I heard divorces and custody fights, and more disputes over a father’s house than I can count. I learned that nobody fights hardest over what a thing is worth. They fight over what it means.
I never expected my hardest case to be my own.
My husband, Richard, was a finish carpenter and later a contractor, a big, slow-spoken man with sawdust in his eyebrows and a pencil permanently behind one ear. He built our house outside Cedar Falls with his own hands, over three years, on weekends and evenings, on four acres of ground we bought in 1989 for $31,000. Every beam, every hinge, every white oak floorboard carried some part of him. He planed the stair rail until it felt like skin.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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