PART 6 — Dividing the Numbers !!
Mediation, Renata told me, was not a place for speeches.
It was a place for spreadsheets.
We met on a gray Tuesday morning in a conference room that could have belonged to any dentist’s office — beige walls, a box of tissues placed with obvious intention in the center of the table, a mediator named Karen Liu who spoke in the calm, unhurried cadence of someone who had watched hundreds of marriages end and knew exactly how much silence a room could hold before someone needed to fill it.
Tyler brought his own attorney, a quiet man named Frank Delacroix who spoke maybe a dozen words in three hours, mostly to confirm numbers.
We started, as Karen put it, “with the boring things first, because the boring things are usually the fastest to agree on, and agreement builds momentum.”
Before the numbers, though, she laid out ground rules, the same ones, she said, she gave every couple who sat in those two chairs.
“No interrupting. No raising voices. If either of you needs a break, say so, and we’ll take one. This isn’t about winning. It’s about the two of you agreeing to terms you can both live inside of for the next decade, because you’ll be co-parenting long after today is over.”
“Understood,” Tyler said.
“Understood,” I said.
“Good. Then let’s talk about the house.”
The house. We’d bought it six years ago, before Ashley Cho, before any of it, and it held more good memories than bad ones even now, which felt unfair in a way I didn’t say out loud. We agreed I would keep it, with Mason, and Tyler would be bought out of his equity share over three years rather than forcing an immediate sale, an arrangement Karen said was common when kids were involved and stability mattered more than a clean, fast break.
The pension was more complicated.
“Airline pensions are often the single largest marital asset in these cases,” Karen explained, “larger than the house, sometimes larger than everything else combined. We’ll need a qualified domestic relations order — a QDRO — to divide it properly. That’s not something we draft in this room. That takes a specialist.”
Renata had already flagged this before we walked in, had already lined up a pension-valuation expert named Sandra Voss who spent forty minutes on a video call two weeks later walking me through vesting schedules and present-value calculations in language I had to ask her to repeat twice, patiently, without making me feel stupid for not understanding a system designed, it seemed, to be hard to understand.
“Why does this take a specialist?” I asked Karen, during a break, coffee gone cold in a paper cup. “It’s just math, isn’t it?”
“It’s math the courts are picky about,” Karen said. “A pension isn’t like a checking account. It’s a promise of future income, and dividing a promise fairly takes someone who understands vesting schedules, survivor benefits, cost-of-living adjustments. Get it wrong and one of you could end up with far less than you think you agreed to, sometimes not until retirement, when it’s too late to fix.”
Sandra Voss’s numbers, when they came back two weeks later, were more favorable to me than I’d expected, largely because of how long Tyler had been with the airline before we’d even met — a detail that mattered, Sandra explained patiently, because only the portion of the pension earned during the marriage was subject to division, not the years he’d flown before he knew I existed.
“So some of it was always just his,” I said.
“Some of it was always just his,” Sandra agreed. “Marriage doesn’t erase a person’s whole history. It just becomes part of it for a while.”
In the end, my share came to a number that felt both enormous and completely insufficient, the way I imagine any number does when it’s meant to represent the back half of a marriage.
The six thousand dollars I’d traced in hotel upgrades and florist charges and one returned piece of jewelry came up too, in a quieter conversation between the lawyers, framed not as punishment but as an adjustment — an acknowledgment that marital funds had gone somewhere the marriage hadn’t agreed to.
Tyler didn’t contest it.
“I’m not going to fight you on the six thousand dollars,” he told Frank, loud enough for the room to hear. “She’s right about where it went.”
Karen made a note and moved on, brisk, unsentimental, the way I was starting to understand a good mediator needed to be.
“I want more than every-other-weekend,” Tyler said, when we got to custody. “I know I don’t get to demand anything. I’m asking, not demanding. He needs more of me than a couple days a month, especially now.”
“I’m not trying to cut you out,” I said. “I want him to still know his dad is a real, present part of his week. I just also need a schedule I can actually plan a job and a life around.”
“What if we built it off my actual trip schedule instead of a generic calendar? I can request certain rotations. I already asked scheduling if that was possible.”
Karen made a note. “That’s actually a good approach. Courts favor plans that reflect real life over ones that look tidy on paper but collapse the first time somebody’s flight gets delayed.”
Custody took longer, though less contentious than I’d feared. Neither of us wanted a fight that used Mason as ammunition, and Renata told me later that this alone put us ahead of maybe half her caseload.
We settled on a schedule built around Tyler’s flight rotations rather than a rigid weekly split — three or four days when he was home between trips, video calls on the days he was flying, holidays alternating starting the following year. Karen called it “a parenting plan built for real life instead of a fantasy of what family should look like,” and something about that phrase stayed with me for weeks afterward.
Child support was calculated using state guidelines and Tyler’s reduced but recovering income, adjusted for his return to full flight status after the suspension ended.
“One more thing,” Karen said, near the end, flipping to a fresh page. “Health insurance. Mason’s currently covered under Tyler’s plan through the airline.”
“I’d assumed that would just continue,” I said.
“It can, but it needs to be written into the agreement specifically, including who handles the premium if Tyler changes employers, and what happens if his employment status changes again.” She glanced up, not unkindly. “I know that’s an uncomfortable thing to plan for. But we plan for it so nobody has to scramble later.”
Frank Delacroix, Tyler’s attorney, spoke up for one of the only times that day.
“My client wants it on record that he intends to maintain coverage regardless of what the minimum agreement requires.”
“Noted,” Karen said, writing it down anyway. “Intentions are lovely. We’re still putting it in writing.”
It was, I thought, a strange kind of comfort, watching two attorneys and a mediator build a fortress of paperwork around my son’s future, brick by unglamorous brick, so that nothing about his stability would ever again depend entirely on one person’s good intentions.
By the time we left the mediation room that afternoon, six hours after we’d walked in, I felt less like a woman whose marriage had ended and more like an accountant who had just closed a very long, very painful set of books.
Outside, in the parking lot, Tyler caught up to me before I reached my car.
“Can I ask you something? Not about any of the paperwork.”
“Okay.”
“Do you think there’s ever a version of this where you’d want to try again? Not now. Not soon. Just — someday?”
I thought about the honest answer for a long moment, because he deserved a real one, even now, maybe especially now.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m not closing a door to punish you. I genuinely don’t know yet. But I know it’s not a door that opens because you want it to. It opens, if it ever does, because of what you actually do for the next few years. Not what you say in a parking lot.”
He nodded, like he’d expected exactly that answer and had asked anyway, because some questions need to be asked out loud even when you already know.
“That’s fair,” he said.
“Go be someone Mason can trust again,” I told him. “That’s the only project that matters right now. Not us.”
He watched me get in my car.
I didn’t look back to see his face this time either.
I was starting to understand that I didn’t need to anymore — that some part of watching for his reactions, managing his feelings, reading his face for information, had been part of the marriage that had ended too, quietly, somewhere between gate C14 and a mediation room with a strategically placed box of tissues.
PART 7 — Learning to Land Again
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