“Cooperate with what?” my lawyer asked.

“With all of it.”

I didn’t sit across a table from Brandi until the custody hearing.

She had lost weight.

Her hair was pulled back, no makeup, and she wore a cheap gray blazer someone had likely told her to put on.

She looked younger and older all at once.

She glanced at me once when I walked in, and then she stared down at the table.

The judge, a gray-haired woman with reading glasses hanging on a chain, worked through the file slowly.