"Your strongest fact right now isn't that she cheated or that she never paid rent," Clara told me. "It's that she told the responding officers she was voluntarily moving out. We should get the incident report, keep the messages confirming the arrangement, and give her a reasonable chance to collect her property. Do not start improvising the law because you're understandably angry."
"Can I change the locks?" I asked.
"Let's confirm the move-out and keys first. She's left, but there may be disagreement about whether she surrendered occupancy. If she claims she didn't, we handle that properly. I don't want you creating a separate problem that distracts from what actually happened."
I had bought replacement locks online during the night. I canceled the installation appointment and wrote down her advice. It wasn't as satisfying as marching into a hardware store with a new deadbolt, but satisfaction was no longer the point. I wanted a resolution that wouldn't collapse the next time someone put it in front of a judge.
That afternoon, while I was putting Minerva's toiletries into a labeled box, I received a call from her older sister. Her name was Billie Martin, although everyone in the family pronounced and sometimes spelled it Billy. She worked in medical billing and had a voice that always sounded as if she had come straight out of a twelve-hour shift. We'd met at holidays and a few birthdays, but we weren't close enough for casual phone calls.
"Patrick? It's Billie. Before you hang up, I'm calling about her things, not to yell at you."
"I wasn't going to hang up."
"That's probably more generous than I deserve after the messages everybody's been sending."
She told me Minerva had said we had separated months earlier and were only sharing a house because neither of us wanted the awkwardness of finding new arrangements. Billie had been skeptical, but she had also heard Minerva describe me as distant for weeks and had assumed the relationship was ending quietly. When her mother called about the police, Billie asked to see the ring and discovered how recently the engagement had happened. That made the supposed separation timeline difficult to believe.
"She tells a story with enough true pieces that you start thinking the whole thing has to be true," Billie said. "I'm sorry I didn't ask better questions."
I told her she didn't owe me an apology for something she'd been told by a person she loved. Billie thanked me and asked whether she could pick up the remaining items after work. We agreed on a time, and I sent photographs of the boxes so there would be no confusion about what I was offering. I also asked her to tell Minerva that anything genuinely belonging to her would be made available, even if it took a second trip.