After nineteen years of marriage, my husband, Jaxon West, told me he wanted to begin a new life with a twenty-six-year-old colleague named Blair.
Soon afterward, he arranged a destination wedding and invited many of our mutual friends, along with our seventeen-year-old son, Parker, and fifteen-year-old daughter, Hazel.
Then, late one night, a message appeared on my phone.
Jaxon instructed me to leave our home before he returned.
I sat alone in the darkness reading those words several times.
Nineteen years of marriage had somehow been reduced to a few sentences on a screen.
Then I remembered something important.
Six years earlier, before my father passed away, he had carefully arranged the ownership of our family property in my name.
At the time, I had viewed the deed mainly as another piece of paperwork associated with his estate.
That night, it became something else.
Protection.