The mediation office smelled like new carpet and old coffee, the kind of sterile, deliberately neutral space designed to make two people who no longer knew how to speak to each other pretend, for two carefully scheduled hours, that they still somehow could.
Marcus sat across the table with his lawyer beside him, dressed the way he always dressed for anything that mattered, precise, controlled, a man performing composure for an audience even when the only audience left was me and two lawyers being paid to watch. I sat beside my own lawyer, hands folded in my lap, and found I didn't recognize the calm settling over me, steady in a way I hadn't expected to feel walking through those doors that morning.
"My client is prepared to discuss a reasonable division of shared assets," Marcus's lawye
