Old enough to know that winning against someone you once loved still leaves blood on the floor, even if it is only yours.
The next six weeks became a slow legal grind, which is to say the American way of translating heartbreak into paperwork.
Paula retained a new attorney named Elaine Cole—mid-thirties, sharp, competent, unlucky. By then the case had narrowed. The house was the only major jointly titled asset left with clean marital exposure. The business fight collapsed almost immediately once Elaine saw the restructuring timeline and realized every move had been made long before Paula chose confession as theater.
I gave my deposition in a gray conference room with stale coffee and bad lighting.
Elaine tried, to her credit.
“Mr. McCarthy, are you asking this court to believe that the restructuring of your business was entirely unrelated to concerns about your wife’s behavior?”
“I’m asking the court to believe documentation with dates on it.”
“Did you suspect your wife was unfaithful at the time?”
“Yes.”
“So the restructuring was motivated by marital distrust.”
“It was motivated by prudence.”
She pressed.
“Prudence tied to suspected infidelity.”
“No,” I said. “Prudence tied to the fact that I had evidence my wife was involved in financial misconduct.”
That changed the room.
Because affair evidence makes judges tired.
Fraud evidence makes them attentive.
Paula sat three chairs down in a navy suit that cost more than my first used truck. She did not look at me. She looked at a legal pad, writing nothing.
At one point, Elaine asked whether I had taken steps to intentionally humiliate my wife by cooperating with the press.
I answered truthfully.
“No.”
“Did you know your cooperation might result in her name becoming public?”
“Yes.”
“And you did it anyway?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because the money moved through a company bearing my name. And because truth is not humiliation, even when humiliation follows it.”
Christine later told me not to get poetic in depositions.
“I was concise,” I said.
“You were a retired Irish carpenter with a grudge,” she replied.
“Same thing.”
The children became their own emotional jurisdiction during that season.
Renee saw me every weekend, bringing groceries to the hotel until I finally signed a lease on a third-floor apartment on Eagle Street downtown. Big windows. Exposed brick. One bedroom. No one else’s toothbrush in the sink. My mother’s portrait hung above the small writing desk by the window, and for the first time in years I arranged a room entirely according to my own habits.
Michael took longer.
He met me at a diner in Schaumburg in late November. Sat across from me in a blue quarter-zip, wedding ring flashing when he reached for his coffee. He looked tired in the face—a tiredness not entirely his own.
“I’ve seen Mom twice,” he said.
“And?”
“She’s still saying the article exaggerated things.”
“Did she deny the affair?”
“No.”
“Did she deny the payments?”
He hesitated.
“No. She said everybody does things like that to keep businesses moving.”
I laughed before I could stop myself.
Michael winced. “Yeah.”
He rubbed a hand over his mouth. “I don’t know what to do with her.”
“Love her,” I said. “Just don’t confuse love with endorsement.”
He looked at me with something like relief.
“I thought maybe you wanted us to cut her off.”
“No. She’s still your mother. I won’t recruit my children into my divorce. That’s amateur work.”
He gave a tired smile at that.
Then he grew serious again.
“Did you ever still love her while you were preparing to leave?”
I thought about that.
The answer mattered.
“Yes,” I said. “Just not enough to let her bury me.”
He stared into his coffee for a while.
Finally he said, “I think that might be the most adult thing I’ve ever heard.”
“It’s also the saddest.”
Thanksgiving came and went in pieces.
Renee hosted. Michael came. Paula did not.
That was her choice, though she told Brenda later that she had been “excluded from her own family,” which ignored the invitation sitting unread in her email inbox. Narratives are addictive. Once people start building them for self-protection, truth becomes merely one option among many.
Renee made turkey and sweet potato casserole and the green bean dish Paula used to make before she became too important for recipes. My son-in-law Matt carved with excessive seriousness. Lily spilled cranberry sauce on the table runner and nearly cried until I told her great civilizations had survived worse.
At one point, while the football game muttered from the living room and dishes clinked in the kitchen, Renee set a plate of pie in front of me and asked, “Do you miss her?”
Not miss the marriage.
Not miss the house.
Her.
I looked around the table. My granddaughter licking whipped cream from a spoon. Michael laughing softly at something Matt said. Window light already thinning into late-November blue.
“Yes,” I said. “Sometimes.”
Renee nodded. No judgment. Just room.
“What do you miss?”
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