“He gave it to me. Two years before I met you.”
“That’s not how I remember it.”
He even suggested selling it. Getting it appraised and splitting the money.
Ezoic
“It’s worth maybe four hundred dollars,” I told the mediator. I’d had it appraised once, for insurance. “I’ll pay him two hundred dollars right now. Today. Cash.”
“I don’t want two hundred dollars,” Brian said.
“Then what do you want?”
He just looked at me. And he smiled. A little smile. A smile I’d started seeing a lot in that last year.
Anything except letting me have it.
The mediator gave up. It went to the judge. And three weeks before Brian’s move-out deadline, the judge finally ruled that the mirror was mine. My separate property, inherited from my family, given to me before the marriage. Clear as day.
Ezoic
I cried in the parking lot when Claire told me. Not because of the money. Because I’d started to believe that Brian might actually win this one. That I’d lose the last piece of Grandma Lena just because he’d decided I should.
