The divorce proceedings had been ugly, but I thought we had reached the bottom of the barrel. I was wrong. We hadn’t even scratched the surface of Greg’s greed.
We sat in the courtroom, the fluorescent lights buzzing overhead. My lawyer was midway through outlining the standard child support calculations for our three children—ages 12, 14, and 16. It was a simple formula based on income.
Greg’s lawyer stood up. He adjusted his tie and cleared his throat.
“Your Honor,” he said smoothly. “My client objects to these calculations. He requests a stay on all support orders.”
“On what grounds?” the judge asked, peering over her glasses.
“Paternity,” the lawyer replied. “My client asserts that he is not the biological father of the three children in question.”
The room went silent. I gasped, gripping the edge of the table.
“To get out of paying child support during the divorce, my husband claimed our three children weren’t his“.
I looked at Greg. He refused to meet my eyes. He was staring at a spot on the wall, his face a mask of calculated indifference. He knew they were his. Our oldest son had his exact nose. Our daughter had his laugh. Our youngest had his temper.
He wasn’t suspicious of infidelity. He was just cheap. He had decided that humiliating me and traumatizing them was a fair price to pay if it meant he could delay the payments or, by some miracle, void them entirely.
“He demanded a paternity test in court, humiliating me publicly,” dragging my reputation through the mud in front of our neighbors and friends who had come to support us.
The judge granted the test—she had to, legally—but her glare at Greg suggested she knew exactly what game he was playing.
For two weeks, we lived in a purgatory of swabs and silence. I had to explain to my teenagers why they needed to have their cheeks swabbed. I had to watch them process the fact that their father was legally arguing that they were strangers to him.
Then came the results hearing. The kids insisted on coming. They wanted to hear it from him.
The judge opened the envelope. “The probability of paternity is 99.99% for all three children,” she read dryly. “The results proved he was the father“.
I looked at Greg. He shrugged, as if to say, Worth a shot. He turned to his lawyer and whispered about the next delay tactic, completely ignoring the three young people sitting in the gallery behind him.
My children stood up. They weren’t crying. They were staring at the back of his head with a terrifying, vacant intensity.
They realized then that to him, they weren’t people; they were invoices he wanted to shred.
“The look in our children’s eyes when they realized Dad tried to disown them broke something that can never be fixed“.
We walked out of the courtroom. Greg tried to approach them in the hallway, offering a weak smile. “Hey guys, it was just legal strategy, you know? Just business.”
My sixteen-year-old son stepped in front of his siblings. “Don’t,” he said quietly. “You didn’t want to be our dad in there. So you don’t get to be our dad out here.”
They walked past him without looking back. Greg got to keep his money for a few more weeks until the order went through, but he paid a much higher price: he died to them that day, right there in the hallway of the county courthouse.
