“Good,” Diane said.
“I’d recommend moving quickly.
The baby’s due date is in a week.”
—
The new agreement took four days.
Four days of phone calls and document exchanges and one very long afternoon in a conference room where both sets of attorneys sat across from each other and worked through every clause line by line.
Joel was beside me the whole time.
Daniel joined by video call for the section about donor disclosure and his own rights and wishes, which he had spent three days thinking through carefully and arrived at with more grace than I expected.
The altered filing was withdrawn and corrected.
Diane filed a motion explaining the discrepancy and the circumstances.
The judge noted the irregularity formally in the record.
There were no criminal charges — Diane had been right that cooperation changed the calculation — but the notation would remain.
Penelope’s attorney told her plainly that it would follow her if she ever tried something similar again.
