My husband broke up with me via text: «I’m done with you…

Each piece carefully collected over months of quiet observation. Your honor, Mark’s hastily hired lawyer attempted, my client admits to some rash decisions, but Mrs. Harrison’s actions have been vindictive and calculating. Calculating? My lawyer countered.

You mean prudent? My client protected her separate assets and maintained detailed records of her husband’s suspicious behavior. That’s not vindictive. That’s smart business.

The judge reviewed my documentation, the separate property deed to the house, the boutiques incorporation papers in my name only, the careful separation of business and personal finances that Mark had always complained about. Mr. Harrison, the judge addressed Mark directly. You admitted via text message to deliberately emptying a joint account and using shared credit cards to fund a trip with your girlfriend.

Do you deny this? Mark shifted uncomfortably. I was just trying to make a clean break. By committing financial fraud? The judge raised an eyebrow.

And now you’re claiming rights to property that documentation shows is clearly separate from marital assets? The business grew during our marriage. Mark’s lawyer tried again. My client is entitled to.

The business was established before the marriage, my lawyer interrupted, and Mrs. Harrison maintained strict separation of business and personal finances throughout. We have documentation of every penny invested and earned. I watched Mark’s face as reality started sinking in.

He thought this would be easy, empty our accounts, run off with his girlfriend, maybe claim half my business in the divorce. He’d never bothered to understand my insistence on keeping things separate, had mocked my careful bookkeeping as obsessive. The court finds sufficient evidence of financial misconduct, the judge announced.

All shared assets are frozen pending final dissolution. Mr. Harrison is ordered to return any funds removed from joint accounts within 24 hours. But that money’s gone, Mark protested.

We spent it on. Then I suggest you find a way to replace it. The judge cut him off.

And Mr. Harrison, the court takes a very dim view of using shared credit cards to fund adventures with paramours. Outside the courthouse, I heard Melissa asking Mark about their Miami plans. His response was lost in the sound of my heels clicking confidently across the marble floor, heading back to the business he’d never understood or respected.

The next few weeks brought a string of increasingly desperate moves from Mark. He tried claiming the boutique had been his idea. He remembered investing money in its early days.

He even suggested he’d been my business partner all along, claims quickly disproven by my meticulous records. He’s getting desperate, my lawyer observed. His girlfriend’s social media shows they’re staying at her studio apartment now…