Christmas 2021 arrived, and I did my best to make it a good one for the kids. We had taken the traditional Christmas morning pictures, opened stockings, had breakfast, and were opening gifts when it happened.
Hubby called my cell phone.
In retrospect, I should have just ignored the call, but then he would know I was avoiding him. As it happened, the way it worked out was probably for the best. I answered the call, but then barely got a word in edgewise as he ranted on about the grooming I'd (rightly) accused him of, what that meant I believed he wanted to do to his children, and how he couldn't believe I believed that and got the children to believe it too. (Which is not exactly the way it had happened.) He'd checked his heart, of course, and it was clear. He didn't do anything wrong. I sat and listened, unable to figure out how to respond and unable to be impolite and just hang up on him. The call would only last 15 minutes, I knew, and I also knew that there was only maybe 18 minutes of time left that I'd prepaid.
I let him rant. I said I didn't know what he wanted me to say. My daughters were getting uncomfortable. The merry mood was gone. Special Edition typed furiously on her own cell, brought it over, and stuck it in my face. You don't owe him anything. Hang up.
I smiled at her (probably not well), and at last got thanked for using GTE. I dropped my phone in relief.
And he called back.
He apologized for being so harsh, and wished us a merry Christmas, and but everything was tempered by a "but I had to get that off my chest." He wasn't finished when the call disconnected due to running out of prepaid time.
I wasn't sorry. And, I decided at that moment, he wasn't getting another dime of phone time. I would only communicate with him via the texting app...where I could screenshot messages and have proof of things that were said. Not another dime. I am proud to say I kept to that.
We went back to opening gifts, but it took a while for our previous mood to be restored.
Most of our communication from then on centered on messages about the divorce, which he was mad about, or him asking about the kids and me not telling him anything more than sparse information. The girls didn't want him to know about their lives.
August 17, 2022
It's a Wednesday night, and I'm sitting in Panera Bread, enjoying a quiet and solitary dinner by myself while the girls are at youth group. It's my little weekly treat to myself. I've brought my computer, thinking maybe I'll get a little writing done. I don't use the wifi when I'm there because I don't trust free and open wifi, but I don't need it to work on my novel. Or the novella. Whichever. I'm writing them both at the same time because I'm an overachiever like that. And it's been more than a year since my life fell apart; I'd like to get back to what I love to do. But it's hard to write romance when your own has imploded.
My mother texts me. Are you home?
Well, no. I'm not. I'm at Panera. I won't be home for a while.
Call me as soon as you have a chance.
Oh. Dear. I finished my meal in a hurry, feeling the anxiety in her words. Despite being in Panera, I whipped out my earbuds and my phone and called as soon as I finished eating. I was tucked back into a little corner of the restaurant, and pretty much alone. "What's going on?" I asked when she picked up.
"He's taken a plea," she said without preamble.
My gasp was certainly audible.
Now, from almost the beginning, I'd known that Hubby would almost certainly plea out before he even got to a trial. He'd said nothing to me about this, though...not that we were quite exactly on speaking terms at the moment.
"How did you find out?" I asked.
"Your sister was here, and she mentioned it."
The whole chain was that my brother found out first, and called my sister (not me), who then told Mom, who told me. The whys that this was extremely painful are too complicated to get into here, but I'll tell you this was certainly not the way I wanted to find out that Hubby had a plea deal.
I was also irritated with myself. I have a PACER account, and I'd been keeping tabs on the case (and finding out ugly things along the way) that way myself, and no plea arrangements had been up the week before when I'd last checked.
Innyhoo.
I couldn't log into PACER from my phone (it's difficult enough on the computer), so I'd have to wait until I got home. Meanwhile, I messaged SnarkyDad to bring him up to speed.
I came home after picking up the girls from church and hid in the library. Hubby was pleading guilty to the one distribution count; the possession counts would be waived with the plea. I downloaded the PDF of the plea deal--all 38 pages of it--and started reading. That's when I learned Hubby'd shared more than 600 images and videos.
There was no way this was as innocuous as he once tried to make it sound over the phone, early in his detention.
August 22, 2022
We have all been in some pretty intense therapy, and we had a family counseling session scheduled that night. It was also open house night at the school, which I didn't get to go to by virtue of work. But I had to pick the kids up from it. I'd had a terrible day, and I was still reeling from both the reality of the plea deal and its associated ugliness (my attorney said he was looking at 13 to 16 years, with $20,000 to $30,000 in fines, with the plea deal), plus he'd sent us his counter proposal for the divorce settlement a few days before the plea deal broke, and he wanted 10% ownership of my writing. I was a hot mess. And one of my children casually mentioned at the start of the family session, "Oh, Mom, the social worker came by today, and she wants you to call her."
I completely lost it. Why had CYS been by again? I thought we were in the clear after their first investigation, from the day of Hubby's arrest. It took 20 tearful minutes for me to sort out the details: they had shared some stuff with our counseling team, which probably hadn't generated a mandatory report, but decided they needed to talk to someone with greater authority, and had gotten the name and phone number of the FBI victim specialist, who had dealt with them on the day of Hubby's arrest, from Special Edition. And that had generated a report.
Dandy.
And that's how I found out more of the ugliness my husband had perpetrated in our own house.
I had Wednesday off, so I stuck in a meeting with our social worker too. The day's schedule was tight: Oldest had her formal senior portraits at 9:05 at the school. I met with the social worker at 10:30 for about an hour, because then Youngest and I had to be in ChocolateTown at 12:45 for a doctor's appointment (an hour's drive). Then back home, to drop her off, and turn around and run back up to Lisle for my dentist appointment (a filling and a crown) at 3:40. Somewhere in the mix of all that was Hubby's Change of Plea hearing, and I deliberately opted to not know the time. I didn't have time to go, nor the desire. However, when my mother-in-law called for the second time while I was in the dentist's chair, I apologized and answered the phone, afraid that something had happened.
No, she just wanted to pass on the message that Hubby loves his wife and children very much. Oh, and Bro was in the courtroom, which made Hubby very angry. Well, I can't control my brother's actions, and I had no idea he was even in the state (he's a long-haul trucker), let alone near BigTown.
That night, I talked to my brother on the phone for the first time in years. He wanted to be sure I wanted to hear it all. Well, it's my life...of course I'm not sure, you idiot, but I need to know the truth. My brother related in a sad voice how nearly everything the FBI had seized from our house (it was a lot) had child pornography on it. There was stuff found on the laptop they missed that I turned in about two weeks after his arrest (not sorry I did that). There was stuff found on one of my old laptops. The victims ranged in age from 2-3 to as old as 12, in photos and videos. The content was unconscionable.
He'd been using the Kik app since 2016, and that's how and where he was sharing things. He'd been caught in December 2020 because an FBI agent had infiltrated the chat room he was in, posing as a 12-year-old, and Hubby just voluntarily shared things. That would be when their investigation began in earnest.
Sentencing would be at least five months down the road.
I could only hope that we'd get our divorce settled before then, so that his sentence didn't affect me.
