Just Three Days After Bringing My Newborn Daughter Home, My Own Husband Locked Me Out of the Mansion I Had Bought Long Before He Ever Entered My Life. / Chapter 4 / 7

Chapter 4 - The DeedI didn't wait for a locksmith. I drove — carefully, slowly, every stitch from the surgery aching with each turn of the wheel — to my sister Priscilla's apartment fifteen minutes away, carrying Wren and a diaper bag and absolutely nothing else, because everything else I owned was sitting inside a house I couldn't currently enter.

Priscilla took one look at me standing in her doorway and didn't ask questions. She simply took the car seat from my arms and said, "Sit down before you fall down," which is precisely the kind of practical, unglamorous love that had gotten the two of us through our parents' divorce, both our own difficult twenties, and now, apparently, this.

Once Wren was fed and settled and I'd eaten something that wasn't hospital cafeteria food for the first time in four days, I called my attorney, a sharp, unflappable woman named Corinne Achebe who had handled every contract for both of my companies and, as it turned out, still had the original title paperwork for the Sausalito house on file from when I'd purchased it nine years earlier.

"The deed is in your name only," Corinne confirmed within the hour, pulling the file up on her end while I sat on Priscilla's couch with Wren asleep against my chest. "Sole ownership, purchased with cash, seven years before you met Mr. Cole. He has no legal ownership interest in that property whatsoever, regardless of how long you've been married."

"He said half of everything is his."

"Half of marital assets acquired during the marriage, potentially, depending on your state's laws and whatever else we find when we look at your full financial picture together," Corinne said. "The house you bought and owned outright nine years before the marriage even began is not a marital asset. It's yours. Fully, unambiguously, legally yours. And locking you out of your own property — three days postpartum, with a newborn — is not a 'difficult transition period.' It's illegal, and depending on what else is going on inside that house right now, it may be considerably more serious than a locked door."