The Choice I Almost Didn’t Make
By June, I had two real options in front of me, and neither one felt comfortable.
I could let it go. Move forward, keep my head down, focus on Dylan, and stop trying to account for money that technically had never been in my name anyway. That was the version of me who had kept the peace for eleven years, the version who kept granola bars in a drawer for other people’s kids.
Or I could actually find out where that $12,000 cushion had gone, and use whatever I learned to make sure Dylan had a real, enforceable child support order in place before Ethan’s finances—whatever state they were quietly in—got any more complicated.
A consultation with a family law attorney in Aurora cost $150, money I didn’t love spending out of an account with $1,140 in it. Filing fees on top of that ran close to $230. Dylan needed new shoes. He’d already outgrown the ones from Christmas.
The attorney, a soft-spoken woman named Patricia who kept a jar of butterscotch candies on her desk, didn’t try to talk me into anything. “You carried two pregnancies for other families and came out of it with no formal support order for your own son,” she said, reading over the intake sheet I’d filled out in the waiting room. “That’s not unusual. It’s just not right. We can fix the second part, even if we can’t fix the first.”
If I stayed quiet, things might stay simple, but Dylan could end up with nothing formal to depend on if Ethan’s situation, whatever it was, got worse instead of better.
If I pushed, I risked Ethan’s anger, Diane’s embarrassment, and money I genuinely couldn’t spare.
I made the appointment anyway, the second week of June. Not for revenge. For Dylan, and for the version of myself who had spent two pregnancies being told “our future” when apparently only one of us had gotten to decide what that word meant.
That was the same week Jamie called me in the juice box aisle at Target.
