The specific language of actuarial tables and compliance documentation which asked nothing of me emotionally and required only the particular kind of attention I was capable of giving at that point. I answered emails. I reviewed documents. I made calls in the parking structure where the signal was better and Ezra wouldn't overhear anything. Reeves and I spoke every morning.
The process she had initiated moved through two stages in the first week. The first was the emergency motion. A request to the court to freeze the marital assets as a protective measure during divorce proceedings on the grounds that demonstrated destruction of shared property, indicated willingness to dissipate marital assets unilaterally. The legal language is dense but the argument is simple. If someone has already burned a school bag, the court has reason to believe they might also try to move money or transfer property before a fair division can occur.
The fire was documented. A neighbor had camera footage from the driveway that showed the smoke column. Ezra had been present. The second stage was the divorce filing itself initiated by me with a request for primary residential custody of Ezra on the grounds that his primary caregiver for the past 11 years had been his father and that his current living situation in the marital home had been disrupted by his stepmother's actions. Reeves was careful with me about expectations.
She told me asset freezes get contested that Natasha would retain her own counsel and that counsel would argue the freeze was punitive rather than protective. She told me to let her do the legal talking and to document everything which I was already doing. I kept a log on my phone times, dates, specific things said or done. A record of the kind that a person who understands how these things work starts keeping before they fully admit to themselves that they are going to need it. On the fourth day after the fire, Ezra sat at the hotel table in the evening and started drawing.
He used the hotel notepad, the small one with the brand name at the top, and a pencil he'd had in his jacket pocket. He drew for about 40 minutes without looking up. I was at the other side of the table reading something on my laptop that I wasn't really reading and I watched him without making it obvious that I was watching. When he finished, he turned the notepad around so I could see it. It was the charred panel.
He'd drawn it from the angle it was sitting at on the table by the window, that specific position with the scorch marks rendered carefully and the texture of the canvas done in crosshatching. It was the most technically precise thing I had seen him draw. I told him it was good. He said he knew, which was not arrogance. It was the accurate self-assessment of someone who had been drawing since he was 4 years old and knew what his own work looked like.
He tore the page off the notepad and folded it and put it in the pocket of his jacket. That night after he was asleep, I sat at the table and looked at the panel itself. The real one, the burned canvas by the window, and I thought about what it meant that he'd needed to document it. Not the fire, the object, the specific thing that had survived the fire in its damaged form and was still here, still had a shape. The fourth day was also when Natasha made her first attempt to use the joint account.
Reeves had told me the freeze would take several business days to fully process. The alert came to my phone at 11:17 in the morning. Attempted withdrawal from the joint account declined system flag for frozen status. The amount she had tried to withdraw was not small. I noted it in the log and sent it to Reeves.
Natasha called me that afternoon. I let it go to voicemail and listened to the message. She was not screaming. She was calm in the way people are calm when they are managing a specific kind of panic. She said the freeze was unnecessary and retaliatory.
She said she needed access to the account to pay for things she needed. She said I was using the legal system to punish her. She did not mention Ezra. I called Reeves and left a message about the voicemail. I did not call Natasha back.
The second call came the following evening while Ezra and I were eating dinner from takeout containers at the hotel table. I saw her name on the screen. Ezra saw it, too. He looked at the phone and then looked at his food and continued eating, which was its own kind of answer about what he needed from me in that moment. I let it go to voicemail again.
This one was different. Her voice had changed. Not crying, but something adjacent to it. Something that in a different context might have reached me. She said she hadn't meant for things to go this far.
She said she had been under a lot of pressure and had made a decision she hadn't fully thought through. She said she wanted to talk. I listened to it twice. Then I closed my phone. On the fifth day after the fire, Natasha tried to use the credit card attached to the joint account.
She was at a restaurant with Theo. Reeves had told me the card would also be flagged under the freeze. I know this because the restaurant called the number on file, which was mine, to advise that a card had been declined and to confirm whether there was a second form of payment. I said there was no second form of payment and thanked them for calling. I heard about the rest through Reeves, who heard it from other channels, Theo had been at the dinner.