"You're going to want to defend yourself everywhere," he said. "Pick one place, say what happened, and stop. Otherwise the argument becomes the rest of your life."
He was right. I wrote a short statement that afternoon and asked Nina to check that I hadn't included anything about my employer. I removed account numbers and addresses from the supporting screenshots, kept the police report number private, and posted only what I could personally verify: Minerva and I had been in a relationship until Thursday; she told me she was engaged to another man; she chose to move out that evening; arrangements had been made for her remaining belongings. I included the dated message she'd sent me three days before, telling me she loved me, because the claim that we had broken up months earlier was false.
The post spread farther than I expected. Friends who had been confused by her video began asking questions. A few acquaintances apologized for messages they'd sent me earlier. Others wanted details about Landon, timelines, and whether the engagement ring was real. I didn't answer those questions. I had enough trouble accounting for my own choices without becoming the narrator of everyone else's gossip.
Minerva responded with another video. She said I was weaponizing paperwork and exploiting her vulnerability, then spent several minutes discussing how financially comfortable I was compared with her. I watched enough to understand the accusation and closed the app. Watching someone describe ordinary documents as manipulation while using a public audience to pressure me felt like looking into a mirror that had been built to make me seem guilty no matter where I stood.
At noon I called an attorney whose number Jonah had recommended. Her name was Clara Singh. She practiced civil litigation and handled property disputes, landlord-tenant questions, and the sort of boundary problems that begin in relationships and end with people arguing over who owns a coffee machine. She asked me to explain the situation without adjectives. After ten minutes, she gently interrupted me and said, "Start again at the point she moved into the house. What was agreed?"
I told her about Minerva's temporary stay, the absence of rent payments, and the Thursday-night conversation with the officers. Clara corrected two things immediately. First, a person doesn't automatically lack housing rights because they never paid rent. Second, the fact that I owned the property didn't make every possession in it mine. I felt a flush of embarrassment when she said that, because I'd already congratulated myself for being the reasonable adult in the situation.