But if you can bear to wait, and let him keep believing he’s won, he will hand us far more than we even need, and he will do it in his own words, in his own handwriting.”

So we let Derek talk.

I did not wear a wire; we did not need one, because Derek could not stop putting things in writing.

All I had to do was stop arguing — stop resisting, go quiet, let him believe the fight had gone out of me — and he filled the silence himself.

Within a few weeks he had sent me dozens of text messages, laying out in detail how the property would be transferred, when, and to whom.

And Sylvia, never able to resist a threat, sent messages of her own, warning that if I “made any trouble,” Derek would sue for sole custody and tell the family court I was mentally unstable, an unfit mother, a danger to my own child.