I drove. Dana filed four days after the cabin. She'd had an attorney on the phone before she left the gravel lot and by Monday morning she had an appointment and by Thursday the paperwork was moving. She texted me once to let me know. I wrote back that I was glad she had what she needed and she replied that she did and that was more or less the last time we spoke.
We weren't friends exactly. We were two people who needed the same thing at the same moment and had helped each other get it. That was enough. I didn't need it to be more than that. Brent went back to work Monday with a swollen eye and a cut that had scabbed over into something that wasn't easy to explain away.
He worked in the same building as Holly. People notice things. People talk. I don't know exactly what version of events circulated through their office that week, but I know that by Wednesday his manager had called him in for a conversation and I know that whatever professional credibility he'd built in that role, whatever version of slick he'd been performing for his co-workers, took damage he wasn't going to be able to. Walk back.
He hadn't lost his job last I heard, but there's a difference between keeping your job and keeping your standing and he'd lost the second one. That tends to be its own slow consequence. Holly moved out of our house before I filed. She didn't fight me on the house which I'd expected her to. I think she understood by the end that fighting me on anything was going to require her to dispute evidence she knew existed and couldn't disappear.
The settlement was clean. My attorney was efficient. Holly got what she'd contributed and left everything else where it was. She was living with her sister for a few months and then from what I understood second hand, she moved out of state. I didn't ask where.
I didn't need to know. Rick moved out the same night we drove back from the cabin. He went to a hotel, then to a short term rental, then to an apartment. He filed about 3 weeks after I did. He and Amber apparently had almost no direct conversation about any of it.
No tearful confrontation, no request for an explanation. Rick had seen what he'd gone up there to see, and it had answered every question he had, and he wasn't interested in Amber's version of events. He just left. His attorney did the talking from there. I've run into him once since, at a hardware store, and we talked for maybe 5 minutes.
He seemed okay, quieter than before, maybe, but okay. I didn't ask about Amber, and he didn't bring her up. We talked about his new apartment having old pipes, and I told him what to look for. That was the whole conversation. I moved into a two-bedroom apartment on the east side of town about 6 weeks after the cabin.
I didn't need two bedrooms, but the rent wasn't much different from the one-bedroom, and I figured I'd use the space. I set up the second room as an office. I put my workbench stuff in there, my tools, a decent monitor. It's quiet. The building has a laundry room on the ground floor, and a parking lot with good lighting, and neighbors who mostly keep to themselves.