WHEN I FACED MY HUSBAND AND HIS LOVER IN COURT, MY LAWYER SAID: “YOUR HONOR, ONE MORE WITNESS.” THE ROOM WENT DEAD QUIET. MY CHEST LOCKED – “ΝΟ… IT CAN’T BE,” I WHISPERED. MY HUSBAND’S SMILE COLLAPSED WHEN HE SAW… WHO WOULD WALK IN…
When I saw my husband and his lover in court, a special witness walked in. His smile collapsed. Enjoy my new story. My husband sat 12 ft away from me in that courtroom, and the woman he’d been sleeping with was right behind him. Trent Somerville. The man I’d shared a bed with for 8 years, looked relaxed, almost bored, like this whole divorce was a chore he just needed to get through before lunch.
Sabrina Feld sat in the gallery behind him with her legs crossed and her chin up like she’d already won something. My lawyer, Connie, stood up and said five words that changed everything. Your honor, one more witness. The room went quiet. Not movie quiet, real quiet. The kind where you can hear the air conditioner clicking. My chest locked.
I looked at the doors in the back of the courtroom and whispered, “No, it can’t be.” Trent’s smile, that confident, lazy, I’ve got this handled smile, collapsed the second he saw who walked in. My name is Arya Marquez. I’m 32 years old, and up until about 9 months ago, I thought I had a pretty normal life. I work as a payroll coordinator at a regional trucking company in Wilmington, Delaware.
I make 52,000 a year, which isn’t glamorous, but it pays the bills, or at least it used to. I married Trent Somerville when I was 24. We’d been together since I was 22. Met at a friend’s Fourth of July party in Bear, Delaware, where he spilled lemonade on my sandals and somehow turned it into a first date. He was charming, tall, easy laugh, the kind of guy who made you feel like you were the only person in the room.
He ran an auto detailing business, two locations, one on Kirkwood Highway and one near Newark. I handled the household. He handled the business money. That was the deal. I never questioned it because I never had a reason to. The reason showed up in our mailbox on a Tuesday in April. It was a Chase credit card statement addressed to Trent at our home address, but for an account I’d never seen before.
I almost tossed it in his pile of business mail. But the envelope was already half open, like the seal didn’t stick right, and my eyes caught a number. $1,740. That was the charge at a jewelry store in King of Prussia Mall. Below that, $489 at a boutique hotel in Cape May, New Jersey. And at the bottom, $67 at a florist. Dated a random Tuesday.
My birthday is in November. Valentine’s Day was 2 months gone. Our anniversary is in June. I stood in the kitchen holding that statement and thought, “Who is getting flowers on a Tuesday in April?” I asked Trent that night. Calm, reasonable, just asked. And here’s the thing. He didn’t flinch. Didn’t stammer. Didn’t avoid my eyes.
He looked at me like I was being silly. Said it was a business credit card for client appreciation. The jewelry. A watch for a fleet account manager who brought in big referrals. The hotel? A team strategy retreat with his two shop managers. The flowers for a client’s wife who’d helped them land a new commercial contract. Every answer came out smooth and warm like he’d rehearsed them in the shower.
His team planning session apparently required a king-size bed, a late checkout, and a hotel that advertises couples massages on the homep. But when someone you love looks you in the eye and tells you you’re wrong, you want to believe them. So, I did, or I tried to, but I didn’t throw away that statement. Something in my gut, the same gut that told me lemonade on my sandals was actually clumsy, not charming, said keep it.
I put it in a shoe box under the guest bathroom sink. Didn’t tell anyone. Actually, that’s not true. I told one person, Gretchen Somerville, Trent’s younger sister, and I thought my closest friend in Wilmington. We’d been having lunch together every other week for 6 years. She knew how I took my coffee, knew I was scared of escalators, knew I cried at dog food commercials.
I trusted her. I sat across from her at a cozy on Conquered Pike and told her about the credit card, the hotel, the flowers. She squeezed my hand and said she’d look into it. 24 hours later, Trent came home furious. Accused me of trying to poison his family against him. Gretchen had told him everything, every word, every worry, every tear.
That’s when I understood something that took the breath right out of me. I had no one. My parents and my sister are in Tucson, Arizona. 2,400 miles away. I had built my entire life inside the Somerville world. Trent town, Trent’s people, Trent’s family. And now the walls were closing in from every side. I work in payroll.
I stare at financial documents 8 hours a day, 5 days a week. I know what a legitimate business expense looks like. And flowers on a random Tuesday for a client’s wife don’t look like one. But love is funny that way. It makes you dumb on purpose. And love, I was learning, was the most expensive thing I’d ever paid for.
That shoe box under the guest bathroom sink would end up holding a lot more than one credit card statement. But I didn’t know that yet. All I knew was simpler and worse. The man sleeping 3 ft away from me every night was someone I had never actually met.
Now things got worse, a lot worse. 5 months crawled by, April to August, and Trent didn’t pull back. He leaned in. He started coming home later, 9:00, 10:00, sometimes not until midnight, always at the shop or meeting a parts supplier in Philly. His phone lived face down on the kitchen counter like it was hiding from me.
And here’s a detail that still makes my skin crawl. He started showering the second he walked through the door. 11 p.m. on a Wednesday and the man who used to fall asleep on the couch watching ESPN was suddenly obsessed with personal hygiene. If cleanliness is next to godliness, Trent Somerville was trying to wash away some very serious sins.
The financial squeeze started in July. I logged into our Joint Bank of America account on a Monday morning before work and saw that $11,200 had been transferred to a business operating account I couldn’t access. I asked Trent. He said, “Equipment upgrades. A new pressure washer system for the Kirkwood Highway location.
The following Saturday, I drove past both shops. No new equipment. Same pressure washers with the peeling decals. Same vacuum stations with the cracked hoses. same faded signage that had needed replacing since 2021. $11,200 of upgrades and not a single thing had changed. Then he changed the password on our savings account just like that.
One morning I couldn’t log in. He said it was a security update and he’d share the new password when he got a chance. He never got a chance. He also reduced his automatic deposit into our joint checking from $3,200 a month down to $1,800. My salary covered the mortgage at $1,640 a month, which left me $160 for groceries, utilities, gas, and everything else.
I started packing leftover spaghetti for lunch. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. My coworker Janine finally asked why I’d been eating pasta 4 days straight. I told her I was on an Italian wellness plan. The plan was called My Husband moved $11,000 and Panera isn’t in the budget anymore. Janine laughed. I laughed too, but mine had a crack in it.
Late August brought the thing that hurt worse than the money. Gretchen, the same Gretchen who’d sold me out to Trent in April, hosted a family barbecue at her house. I was not invited. No call, no text, no “Hey, I know things are weird, but you’re still family.” Nothing. I found out through Instagram because that’s how you discover your life is falling apart in the modern age.
Through someone else’s photo album with a Valencia filter, Gretchen posted pictures of the whole Somerville clan. Burgers, corn on the cob, sparklers in the backyard. And in the background of one photo, standing next to Pauliana, Trent’s mother, the woman I had called mom for eight years, was a woman I didn’t recognize.
Dark hair, sundress, laughing like she belonged there, comfortable at home. Pauliana was handing her a paper plate with a burger on it like she’d been coming to these cookouts for years. That woman was Sabrina Feld. And that image, Pauliana, my mom, serving a plate to the woman my husband was sleeping with, burned a hole in me that I still feel.
In early September, Trent filed for divorce. He filed first. His attorney sent papers demanding a 60/40 split in Trent’s favor. The auto detailing business, which I knew from years of Trent’s casual bragging, was pulling in somewhere around $400,000 a year, was declared in his filing at a total value of $185,000. The house we’d bought 6 years ago for $340,000 was listed at $280,000.
His petition said, and I will never forget this wording, that I contributed minimally to the growth and maintenance of marital assets. eight years of managing the household, paying the bills, keeping his life running while he built his business, and I contributed minimally. His lawyer’s message was simple.
Take the deal or litigation will eat whatever’s left. I drove to the Wawa on Route 202 that afternoon, parked in the far corner of the lot, turned off the engine of my Nissan Pathfinder, and I cried for 40 minutes. Not pretty crying, the ugly kind where your face doesn’t know what shape to be. I had $3,100 in my personal checking account, no local family, no friends.
Gretchen made sure of that, and a husband who had just officially legally declared that I was worth almost nothing. I thought about calling my mom in Tucson, but she’d have booked a flight that night, and I genuinely could not afford to feed another person on the Italian wellness plan.
The next morning, and I don’t know what made me do this, maybe desperation, maybe divine timing, I went to the Wilmington Public Library during my lunch break. I wasn’t looking for anything specific. I just needed a quiet place that wasn’t the house. I wandered to the self-help section and pulled a book off the shelf, something about financial recovery after divorce.
Inside the front cover, tucked like a bookmark, was a business card. Someone had written on the back in blue ink. She’s worth it. Call her. The front read, “Constance Bellamy, attorney at law, family law and asset recovery.” I stared at that card for a long time. Then I called before I could talk myself out of it.
Whoever left that card in that book, if you’re out there, you saved my life. Not in a dramatic way, in the real way. The slow, steady, one phone call at a time way. Connie Bellamy’s office was on the second floor of a narrow brick building on Market Street in downtown Wilmington, right above a sandwich shop called Jordanos that made the whole stairwell smell like roasted peppers.
Connie herself was 58, built like someone who’d played softball in college and never quite stopped walking like she could still turn a double play. She wore reading glasses on a beaded chain around her neck and had a handshake that made you feel like things were about to get handled.
On the wall behind her desk, a framed cross stitch that read, “Assets don’t hide themselves.” Next to it, a photo of two golden retrievers. I found out later their names were plaintiff and defendant, which told me everything I needed to know about Constance Bellamy. She sat me down, poured me coffee from a pot that looked like it had been brewing since the Clinton administration, and said, “Tell me what you got.
” I brought the shoe box, opened it on her desk like it was a tiny coffin full of my marriages sins. Inside the Chase credit card statement from April, six screenshots of Venmo payments from Trent to someone named S. felled totaling $7,600 over 6 months captioned helpful things like lunch supplies and misque and printed Instagram photos from Gretchen’s barbecue showing Sabrina Feld standing in the Somerville backyard like she had a reserved seat at Thanksgiving.
Connie looked at Trent’s proposed asset declaration first. She put her reading glasses on, read for about 90 seconds, took them off, and said the numbers were so creative they should be submitted to a fiction writing contest. Then she got serious. She explained something called dissipation of marital assets.
In simple terms, every dollar Trent spent on Sabrina during our marriage, jewelry, hotels, dinners, Venmo transfers, was money taken from our marital estate. Not his money, our money. And in Delaware, it’s recoverable. But Connie said this wasn’t just a husband spending marital cash on a girlfriend. If Trent was funneling money through his business to fund this, it was financial fraud against the marriage.
She filed subpoenas for Trent’s business bank records from both detailing locations. What came back in October made the shoe box look like a warm-up. First, Sabrina Feld was on the business payroll, listed as marketing consultant. Salary $4,800 per month. She’d been on payroll for 14 months.
I grabbed a pen and did the math right there in Conniey’s office because that’s what payroll coordinators do. We multiply. 14* $4,800 is $67,200. $67,200 paid to my husband’s girlfriend from a business that was half mine. Sabrina had filed W9 tax forms. She’d signed real documents for a position that produced no website, no social media campaign, no marketing plan, no client-f facing materials, nothing.
She was being paid almost 5,000 a month to exist. Second, and this one twisted in a different way. Gretchen Somerville was on the payroll, too. Listed as administrative support salary, $1,200 per month. Gretchen, who had never worked a single day in Trent’s business, who had a full-time job as a receptionist at a dental practice in Middletown, was collecting $1,200 a month for administrative work she never did.
When I saw her name on that printout, something clicked. The barbecue, the phone call to Trent in April, the workplace ambush coming later. Gretchen wasn’t just being a loyal sister. She was on the payroll. Her loyalty had a price tag, and it was $1,200 a month. Connie flagged it but told me to stay focused on the bigger numbers. We’d come back to Gretchen.
Third, a separate LLC I’d never heard of, Coastal Ventures, DE. The business account showed regular transfers to this entity. $93,000 total over 2 years. Connie leaned back in her chair and said Coastal Ventures was a parking lot for money your husband didn’t want you to find. It wasn’t a real business. It didn’t sell anything, produce anything, or employ anyone.
It existed to hold cash somewhere I’d never look. I’ll be honest. I sat in Conniey’s office that afternoon, and my hands were shaking. Not from sadness anymore, from math. I added it up. $67,200 to Sabrina, $14,400 to Gretchen, $93,000 to a fake LLC, plus the $7,600 in Venmo payments. That’s $182,200 in money Trent had moved, hidden, or handed away while I was eating leftover spaghetti and crying in a Waw Wa parking lot.
Late November, Trent figured out I’d hired a lawyer. The subpoenas tipped him off, so he sent Gretchen. She showed up at my workplace during the lunch hour, walked straight into the breakroom, and started talking like she was delivering a sermon. I was destroying the family. Trent had made one mistake. I was going to ruin everyone.
My coworker, Janine, was sitting right there with a turkey sandwich frozen halfway to her mouth. A guy from shipping named Ronnie suddenly found something very interesting about his coffee cup to stare at. I didn’t say a word. I let Gretchen talk until she ran out of fuel, which took about 4 minutes, and then she left. I went back to my desk and emailed Connie every document I’d organized that morning.
People who yell are usually afraid. People who stay quiet are usually ready. That night, I started waking up at 5:30 a.m. Every morning before work, I’d sit at the kitchen table with my laptop and organize every bank statement, every receipt, every screenshot into labeled folders on a flash drive, color-coded, date stamped, cross- referenced.
I work in payroll. Organizing financial data is literally what they pay me to do. People always told me that being a payroll coordinator was boring. And yeah, maybe it is. But boring people notice when the numbers don’t add up. And every number in Trent Somerville’s financial life was screaming.
For the first time in nine months, I felt something other than fear. I felt methodical. And methodical felt like the beginning of something Trent wasn’t ready for. Then Connie called with something I didn’t expect. She said someone had reached out to her office. Someone from Trent’s own family. Not Gretchen. Someone else.
someone who had been completely silent through all of this. And that person wanted to talk. The person who called Conniey’s office was Pauliana Somerville, Trent’s mother. The same woman I’d watched on Instagram handing a burger to Sabrina Feld at the family barbecue like she was welcoming a new daughter.
The woman I’d called mom for 8 years. The woman who hadn’t spoken a single word to me since April. When Connie told me, I sat on the edge of my bed in the guest room because that’s where I slept now and stared at the wall for a solid three minutes. I’d written Piana off completely. After the barbecue photos, after the silence, after watching her stand next to Sabrina like I’d never existed, I figured blood won.
It’s what mothers do. They pick their children even when their children are wrong. I understood it. I hated it, but I understood it. I was wrong about Pauliana. And being wrong about her was the best mistake I ever made. Here’s what happened. The night of that barbecue in late August, after the burgers and the sparklers and the Instagram photos, Trent stayed late at Gretchen’s house.
Most of the family had gone home. Pauliana was still there cleaning up the kitchen. Trent had a few beers in him. And when Trent Somerville had a few beers in him, he talked. He told his mother that the business was clearing over 400,000 a year, more than double what he’d later declare in court. He called me clueless.
Said I’d take whatever scraps he threw because she doesn’t have the spine to fight. He bragged about Coastal Ventures being his escape fund that Arya will never touch. He called the payments to Sabrina the cleanest trick in the book. And then he laughed. sitting in his sister’s kitchen with barbecue sauce on his shirt.
He laughed about gutting his wife financially like it was a clever business move. Pauliana didn’t laugh because she’d heard those exact words before 30 years ago from Trent’s father, Gerald Somerville. The man who built the original detailing shop had done the same thing to Pauliana. Hidden accounts, fake expenses, a woman on the side.
Pauliana stayed quiet back then. Chose loyalty, chose family. And when Gerald died seven years later, she discovered the business went entirely to Trent. The house was mortgaged into the ground and there was nothing left. Pauliana spent her 50s rebuilding from a rental apartment in Bay, Delaware, working the front desk at a veterinary clinic until she could afford a used car and a security deposit on something better.
She heard her dead husband’s words coming out of her living son’s mouth that night, and something inside her cracked open that couldn’t be sealed back shut. 3 days after the barbecue, Pauliana called Connie Bellamy’s office. Trent inherited his father’s business, his father’s charm, and apparently his father’s unshakable belief that women can’t read a bank statement.
The apple didn’t fall far from the tree. It rolled straight into a hidden LLC. The plan came together carefully. Pauliana would testify about Trent’s private admissions, the real business revenue, the coastal ventures purpose, the consulting payments, his stated intent to leave me with nothing. Connie would add Pauliana to the official witness list 14 days before trial, January 2nd, for a January 16th court date per Delaware family court disclosure rules.
No ambush, no tricks, fully legal. And here’s the part that still makes me shake my head. When Trent’s lawyer received that updated witness list and saw Somerville, they assumed she was testifying for Trent. Why wouldn’t they? She’s his mother. Blood is blood. They didn’t call her. Didn’t prep her. Didn’t ask her a single question.
They just assumed. That assumption was the second biggest mistake Trent’s legal team made. The first was thinking I wouldn’t fight. Pauliana also told Connie about a fireproof safe at the Kirkwood Highway shop. Inside it a backup hard drive where Trent kept his real financial records. QuickBooks files going back four years.
Every Coastal Ventures transfer logged internal spreadsheets tracking actual revenue. The safe combination was 44 Trent’s high school football jersey number because of course it was. Connie didn’t mention the safe specifically. She filed a broader discovery motion for all business financial records at the Kirkwood Highway location, including digital media, standard language.
The court granted it. The combination from Polyiana just told us where to look. The hard drive confirmed everything. $410,000 in real annual revenue, $93,000 in Coastal Ventures transfers, the $67,200 in Sabrina’s payments, the $14,400 in Gretchen’s payments, all in Trent’s own spreadsheets. The man kept a detailed record of his own fraud.
I guess when you’re sure nobody will ever look, you get organized. One more thing about those months, Delaware doesn’t require separation before divorce. His lawyer told him to stay in the house to protect his property claim. Connie told me the same. So from November through mid January, 6 weeks, Trent and I lived under the same roof like two strangers in a waiting room.
I slept in the guest room. He came and went at random hours. We passed each other in the kitchen without speaking. He’d leave coffee mugs in the sink. I’d wash them without a word. It was the hardest performance of my life, knowing everything, showing nothing. Some nights I’d lie in that guest room staring at the ceiling and remind myself patience isn’t weakness.
Patience is what separates people who win from people who just react. January 16th arrived. Trent didn’t know what Pauliana had told Connie. He didn’t know about the hard drive. His own lawyer saw Somerville on the witness list and never once picked up the phone to check which side she was on.
Trent walked into that courtroom like a man who’d already won. I walked in carrying nine months of evidence, a forensic accountants report, and one witness he never imagined would speak against him, his own mother. January 16th, the courtroom smelled like burnt coffee and floor wax. Fluorescent lights buzzed overhead with that faint flicker that makes everything feel like a waiting room at the DMV.
Judge Matilda McBrier presided from the bench. early 60s, steel gray hair pulled back, reading glasses she kept taking on and off like punctuation marks. She was known in Delaware family court for two things, thorough questioning and absolutely zero patience for incomplete financial disclosures. I liked her immediately.
Trent sat at the opposite table in a new navy blazer that still had crisp creases down the sleeves. He looked like a man who’d ironed his confidence that morning along with his shirt. Sabrina Feld sat in the gallery directly behind him, legs crossed, chin up, quiet and poised, playing the role of supportive partner watching a formality. Trent’s lawyer opened first.
Arya contributed minimally. The business valuation of $185,000 is accurate. The original 6040 offer was more than fair. Let’s finalize this and move on with our lives. He said it like he was ordering from a drive-thru. Then Connie stood up. She didn’t rush, didn’t raise her voice. She laid out the evidence the way you’d set a table for someone who doesn’t know they’ve been invited to their own funeral.
First, the subpoenaed bank records, the Coastal Ventures LLC. $93,000 in transfers over 2 years to a company that had no employees, no products, no clients, and no purpose other than holding cash where I’d never see it. Second, the payroll record showing Sabrina Feld as marketing consultant, $4,800 per month for 14 months, totaling $67,200 for a position that generated zero deliverables.
No website, no campaign, no analytics report, not even a flyer. Third, Gretchen Somerville listed as administrative support at $1,200 per month, $14,400 total for work. She never performed from a woman who already had a full-time job at a dental practice in Middletown. And finally, the hard drive courtordered recovered from the Kirkwood Highway location authenticated by a forensic accounting firm out of Philadelphia.
Real annual revenue, $410,000 and change, not $185,000. Trent’s own QuickBooks files, his own spreadsheets, his own numbers. Trent’s lawyer objected to the hard drive. Judge McBrier overruled without blinking. It was obtained through a court order and verified by a certified forensic accountant.
The objection didn’t even slow her down. Trent leaned over and whispered something to his lawyer. His lawyer asked for a recess. Denied. Judge McBrier said she wanted to hear all evidence before any breaks. The word all hung in the air a beat longer than it should have. Then Connie stood again. Your honor, we’d like to call one more witness. P.
Somerville, already disclosed on the witness list. I knew this was coming. I’d planned it with Connie. I’d rehearsed my composure in the guest room mirror. But knowing something is coming and watching it arrive are two completely different things. I looked at the courtroom doors and my chest locked. I whispered, “Not for anyone else, just for me.
No, it can’t be.” Not because I was surprised. Because the weight of it hit me all at once. Eight years of calling this woman mom. Thanksgivings, birthday cards with $20 bills tucked inside. The way she taught me to make her brisket. And now she was about to walk through that door and end her own son’s case.
Trent’s reaction came in stages. First confusion. He looked at the doors, then recognition. His mother walking toward the witness stand. Then he turned to his lawyer with a look I will never forget. It wasn’t anger. It was the face of a man realizing that the one wall he thought would never fall just crumbled. His lawyer looked back at him with the exact same expression. They’d had P.
Somerville on the witness list for 2 weeks. Neither of them had called her. My heart was hammering so hard I was sure the court reporter was going to type it into the transcript. Pauliana didn’t look at Trent, not once. She sat down, looked at Judge McBrier, and spoke in a steady voice.
She testified, “After the family barbecue in August, Trent told her privately that the business brings in over $400,000 a year. He called me clueless. He described Coastal Ventures as his escape fund. He called the payments to Sabrina the cleanest trick in the book.” He said Gretchen’s payments were a thank you for keeping her mouth shut.
And he said, “I would take whatever scraps he offered.” Connie asked Pauliana why she decided to come forward. Pauliana said simply her husband did the same thing to her 30 years ago and she stayed quiet. She lost everything. She wasn’t going to watch that happen to someone she loved. Behind Trent in the gallery, Sabrina Feld went very still.
She heard cleanest trick in the book. She heard the consulting payments described as a mechanism for moving money, not a real salary. She looked at Trent. He didn’t look back. The $4,800 a month was never for her. It was never about her. She wasn’t his partner. She was his paper trail. And her signature was on every denine. Judge McBrier’s expression didn’t change, but her questions got sharper.
She asked Trent’s attorney directly whether his client wished to amend his sworn financial disclosures before she issued her ruling. The attorney asked for a sidebar, denied. The judge said she’d heard enough and was prepared to rule. What she said next made nine months of spaghetti lunches worth every single bite.
Judge Matilda McBrier didn’t deliver her ruling with drama. She delivered it the way you’d read someone their tab at the end of a very expensive dinner. Calm, clear, and final. Due to deliberate dissipation of marital assets and fraudulent financial disclosure under oath, the court awarded me 70% of all marital assets, the house, 100% to me.
Trent forfeited his claim through documented financial misconduct. The autodetailing business was ordered for independent appraisal based on actual revenue figures, not the fairy tale $185,000 Trent had sworn to. and I was entitled to my full equitable share. The Coastal Ventures DLC was frozen immediately. All funds subject to equitable distribution.
Then the judge’s voice dropped half a register and the room got very quiet. She referred Trent’s sworn financial filings to the Delaware Attorney General’s Office for perjury review. He had lied under oath about the value of marital assets. She separately referred the business payroll records to the IRS, fictitious consulting and administrative payments used to reduce reported business income constituted potential tax fraud.
She noted that Sabrina Feld, as the recipient of $67,200 in payments for a non-existent consulting position, a woman who filed W9 tax forms for that role, would be included in the IRS referral for potential tax liability review. and Gretchen Somerville’s $14,400 in fabricated administrative payments were flagged as well.
I watched Trent try to stand. His lawyer grabbed his arm, not gently, and pulled him back into his chair. His mouth opened, but nothing came out. The Navy blazer he’d worn to look like a winner looked like a costume on the wrong man. He wasn’t arrested. That’s not how it works. The Attorney General’s office would investigate. The IRS would audit.
Grand jury proceedings take months, but the machinery was grinding into motion, and Trent knew it. He walked out of that courtroom without handcuffs, but with something worse. The absolute certainty that someone was coming for him. He just didn’t know when. And the not knowing, I think, is its own kind of prison.
Sabrina sat frozen in the gallery like someone had unplugged her. Nobody looked at her. Not Trent, not his lawyer, not Polyiana. She came to that courtroom as Trent Somerville’s confident partner, the woman who thought she was next in line. She left as a name on an IRS referral document.
She signed those W9 forms. She deposited those checks. She didn’t design the scheme, but her signature was all over it. She didn’t need a boyfriend anymore. She needed a lawyer. And based on the look on her face, she knew it. Trent once told me about 3 years into our marriage during an argument about whether I should have access to the business accounts that I was too emotional to understand money.
I remember exactly where I was standing by the kitchen sink holding a spatula. I didn’t say anything back. I just turned around and finished making dinner. That moment replayed in my head as Judge McBrier read her ruling, too emotional to understand money. And here I was walking out of a courtroom with the house, a real share of a $400,000 business and a frozen LLC.
Meanwhile, Trent Somerville was walking out with a perjury referral and an IRS audit. Turns out I understand money just fine. I just needed someone to stop lying about it. In the hallway afterward, Gretchen approached me. She started to say something. I don’t know if it was an apology or an excuse or just noise. I walked past her without slowing down.
Didn’t look at her. Not because I was angry, because I was done. Gretchen’s $1,200 a month in sisterly loyalty had just turned into a tax investigation. I had nothing left to say to someone whose support had a payroll number attached to it. By the elevator, I saw Pauliana. She was standing alone, holding her purse with both hands.
She didn’t try to hug me, didn’t make a speech. She just looked at me and nodded. Once I nodded back, eight years of holidays and birthday cards and brisket recipes and Tuesday phone calls lived in that one nod. There was nothing either of us could say that would be big enough for what had just happened. So, we said nothing.
And nothing was more honest than any words.
