She lost the job in April.

The family side was a mediation in July, in an office in downtown Minneapolis, in front of a retired judge.

Everyone had counsel.

That is the part I want to be accurate about, because people always imagine a scene in which I stood over four people and extracted confessions, and what actually happened was a nine-hour day of the most tedious negotiation imaginable, conducted almost entirely between two lawyers in separate rooms, in which I saw my husband for about twenty minutes total.

There were no confessions in that room.

There did not need to be.