I nearly called Brian that afternoon.
His number was still saved in my phone.
For several minutes, I kept looking at it.
I wanted to ask him what he'd done.
I wanted an explanation for the holes in the walls.
I wanted to know why the faucets had been left open.
But more than anything, I wanted to ask about Grandma Lena's mirror.
How could somebody spend nine years married to me and then destroy the one thing he knew connected me to her?
I didn't make the call.
Instead, I took photographs.
I started beside the fireplace.
One close photograph of the hole.
Another from farther away.
Then I held my hand beside the damage so its size would be clear.
I did the same in the hallway.
And again in the pale green guest bedroom.
I went upstairs.
The faucets were closed now, but the wet areas were still visible.
I photographed the bathmat.
The damp floor.
The water marks around the sink.
I took pictures of the kitchen window, which still hadn't cleared completely.
Then I returned to the living room.
The mirror was exactly where I'd left it.
Broken wood.
Scattered glass.
A chipped rose.
I photographed it from several angles.
My hands kept trembling.
Some pictures were too blurry to be useful.
I deleted those and tried again.
Afterward, I called Claire Delgado.
Claire had represented me throughout the divorce.
She was forty-five, with short dark hair, and she could be remarkably gentle until something required her full attention.
She answered almost immediately.
“Nicole? Is everything all right?”
“No.”
I could barely get the word out.
“What's happened?”
“Brian left the house damaged.”
She asked what I meant.
I told her about the walls.
Then the faucets.
Then the mirror.
My voice broke when I got to that part.
Claire became very quiet.
Then she asked me whether I'd taken pictures.
“I have.”
“Good. Don't remove anything yet.”
I told her I hadn't.
She wanted a video of the entire house too.
Not just a recording of the damage.
A full walk-through.
She told me to say the date and time clearly and identify each room.
She also wanted a photograph of the water meter.
I wrote everything down because I was afraid I'd forget.
Then she gave me one more instruction.
“Nicole, leave Brian alone. Don't contact him yourself.”
I looked at his name on my phone.
“I was going to call him.”
“I figured you might. Please don't.”
I agreed.
She reminded me that we still had a hearing scheduled for Thursday.
The remaining financial issues from the divorce hadn't been settled.
Whatever had happened in the house could become important.
I ended the call and started recording.
I spoke my name into the phone.
Nicole Harmon.
Then the date.
Monday, October fourteenth.
The time was 2:47 in the afternoon.
I walked through the hall and described what I saw.
My voice sounded unfamiliar.
I kept pausing to swallow.
When I reached the guest bedroom, I had to stop for a second.
The damaged wall was right beside the window.
I remembered how carefully we'd painted that room.
Back then, we had talked about changing it again once we knew whether the baby would be a boy or a girl.
We never got that far.
After the second miscarriage, I stopped going into the room unless I needed something.
Brian eventually used it for storage.
Now there was a hole in the wall.
I recorded it.
Then I moved on.
When I reached the mirror, I couldn't explain anything.
I held the phone over the broken frame.
For a long time, the recording captured nothing but my breathing.
I wasn't trying to make it dramatic.
I just couldn't speak.
The divorce had already turned so much of my life into paperwork.
Property lists.
Bank balances.
Retirement figures.
Furniture valuations.
Every object had been assigned a number.
The house was simply another item to be divided.
Brian had repeatedly said I was too attached to it.
He told people I was allowing my emotions to interfere with reasonable decisions.
Maybe I was attached.
I had planted the hydrangeas outside.
I'd chosen the red door.
I'd lived through two miscarriages there.
I'd imagined growing old in those rooms.
I couldn't pretend those things meant nothing.
But I also knew a house was not a person.
It could be repaired.
I kept telling myself that as I recorded the broken mirror.
My father arrived before I finished.
I hadn't told him to come.
Claire had called him.
I recognized the sound of his truck before I saw it.
The engine had a rattle when it idled.
Dad insisted there was no reason to fix it.
He always said the truck still got him where he needed to go.
I heard the front door open.
Then his boots on the hallway floor.
He came into the living room without calling out.
Dad was sixty-eight.
He'd spent most of his working life as an electrician.
Years of repairing wiring and fuse boxes had left scars across his hands.
He was tall but had started bending forward a little when he walked.
That afternoon, he wore his usual tan canvas jacket.
He looked at the wall beside the fireplace.
Then the hallway.
Then the floor.
His eyes stopped on the mirror.
He stood there for several seconds.
I watched his face.
“I know, Dad.”
He moved toward it.
Slowly, he crouched beside the broken frame.
His knees made a cracking sound.
He didn't seem to notice.
Dad had known that mirror his entire life.
Long before I stood in front of it with Grandma, he had been a little boy in the same farmhouse.
He touched one of the carved roses with his finger.
“He understood how important this was to you.”
I nodded.
That was the first time I'd heard my father speak about Brian with anything close to anger.
Through eight months of divorce proceedings, Dad had been careful.
He drove me to hearings.
He let me live in my old bedroom when I couldn't bear staying near Brian.
He cooked grilled cheese sandwiches for me late at night.
Sometimes he sat across from me at the kitchen table while I cried.
He never tried to tell me how to feel.
He also never said that he had warned me about Brian.
Even though I knew he hadn't liked him.
Dad stood up.
“Have you taken pictures?”
“Yes.”
“Of the walls too?”
“All of them.”
“And the water?”
“Yes. Claire asked for a video.”
He nodded.
“That's good.”
Then he looked at the hole beside the fireplace.
Something about his expression bothered me.
He was quiet as usual.
But his jaw was tight.
“Dad?”
He turned toward me.
“Listen to Claire,” he said. “Follow her advice.”
“I am.”
“Then leave the rest alone.”
I didn't know what he meant.
I asked him.
He said I shouldn't worry about him.
That made even less sense.
Before I could question him again, he went outside to his truck.
He returned carrying a broom, a dustpan, and a cardboard box.
He left them near the doorway.
“For later,” he explained. “When you're allowed to clear this up.”
He stayed with me until evening.
We went down into the basement to find the water meter.
Dad held a flashlight while I photographed the numbers.
Then he checked the upstairs bathrooms.
He pressed carefully around the edges of the floors.
He looked for places that felt soft.
He checked the ceilings below for stains.
He knew enough about houses to understand how much trouble water could cause.
He didn't say anything else about Brian.
I went home with him that night.
I couldn't sleep in the damaged house.
Not with the broken mirror waiting downstairs.
I lay awake in my childhood bedroom.
The same flowered comforter was on the bed.
Dad had never bothered replacing it.
I listened to him moving around the house.
He stayed awake later than usual.
At one point, I heard him speaking on the telephone.
His voice was low.
I couldn't make out what he said.
I assumed he was talking to Claire.
Maybe to his sister.
I didn't ask.
Tuesday morning, the contractors started arriving.
The drywall man examined the first hole and shook his head.
He looked at the second.
Then the third.
“Whoever did this wasn't having a good day.”
I gave him a tired look.
“That makes two of us.”
He measured the damage and prepared an estimate.
On Wednesday, a plumber inspected the sinks, bathtub, drains, and water heater.
He said the open drains had probably prevented a much larger disaster.
The house hadn't flooded.
But there was moisture damage beneath part of the upstairs bathroom floor.
The bathmat had remained wet long enough to create trouble below it.
The water heater had also been working continuously.
It needed inspection.
The plumber explained something I hadn't considered.
If someone wanted to cause immediate, obvious destruction, they could have blocked the drains.
But leaving the water running with the drains open created a different kind of damage.
Costs accumulated.
The evidence was less dramatic.
The waste continued until someone returned.
I stood beside him in the bathroom.
I thought of Brian.
He had always preferred doing hurtful things quietly.
On Wednesday afternoon, Claire asked me to come to her office.
Her office was on the third floor of an old brick building.
I remembered the smell of overcooked coffee from our first meeting.
That day, it mixed with the lemon lotion she kept beside her desk.
Claire handed me a printed email.
“Brian's attorney finally responded.”
I read it.
Then read it again.
Brian denied causing the damage intentionally.
His lawyer described the holes as ordinary damage associated with moving.
The faucets had supposedly been left open by unidentified people.
And Brian claimed he knew nothing about what had happened to the mirror.
I stared at Claire.
“Unidentified people?”
She nodded without smiling.
“That's what it says.”
“He was the one living there.”
“I know.”
“There are three holes in the walls.”
“I saw the photographs.”
“And he doesn't know anything about the mirror?”
Claire leaned back in her chair.
“Nicole, I understand why you're upset.”
I pressed my hands together.
“He fought me for that mirror for months.”
“I haven't forgotten.”
I wanted to tear the paper in half.
Instead, I placed it on her desk.
Claire waited until I had settled down.
Then she pulled out another document.
“I need you to see something else.”
It was a court motion.
Brian's lawyer had filed it before I discovered the damage.
Brian wanted a larger portion of the assets we still hadn't divided.
He wanted my remaining share reduced by almost a third.
I looked at the stated reason.
Financial hardship.
I couldn't believe it.
Brian earned more than I did.
He worked as a regional sales manager for a medical supply company.
He drove a newer truck.
And he had already placed a deposit on a condominium near the lake.
I'd seen the property listing.
Two bedrooms.
A hot tub.
It didn't look like the home of a man who couldn't afford basic expenses.
“He's telling the court he has no money?”
Claire folded her hands.
“He's claiming his financial circumstances justify changing the division.”
“After what he left me?”
“The motion was submitted before you found the house like that.”
I looked down at the document again.
Claire tapped her pen against her teeth.
She did that whenever she was considering how to approach something.
“The timing matters,” she said.
I waited.
“Tomorrow, he's going to ask the judge to accept his hardship claim. And we're going to present what we found at the property.”
I thought of the bathroom floor.
The damaged walls.
The broken frame in the living room.
For months, I'd believed Brian was fighting because he wanted money.
Now I wondered how much of the fight had simply been about hurting me.
Claire gathered the documents.
“Bring everything you have tomorrow.”
I told her I would.
That evening, Dad and I returned to the house.
Claire had given us permission to clean once the damage had been documented and the estimates obtained.
Dad brought the cardboard box he'd left near the front door.
He also brought thick work gloves.
We stood together looking at the mirror.
“I'll handle the glass,” he said.
I told him I could do it.
He knew I could.
He asked me to let him anyway.
So I sat on the bottom stair.
Dad knelt on the living room floor.
He didn't rush.
He lifted the larger pieces one by one and placed them inside the box.
Then he collected the smaller fragments.
He treated every piece carefully.
I watched his hands.
The same hands that had repaired our furnace.
The same hands that used to carry me when I fell asleep in the car.
Now they were gathering what was left of his mother's mirror.
When he lifted the frame, he turned it over.
There was faint writing on the back.
I'd noticed it before but had never been able to understand it.
Dad brought the wood closer to the light.
He read the initials.
L.M.
Then a short dedication.
From Mama.
And the year.
1952\.
I asked him what it meant.
He sat back on his heels.
He told me Grandma Lena's name before marriage had been Lena Moretti.
Her mother had purchased the mirror from a furniture maker.
She couldn't pay for it all at once.
Instead, she made small payments over two years.
A quarter at a time.
Then she gave it to Lena for her wedding.
I looked at the broken frame.
I'd never heard that part of the story.
Dad smiled sadly.
“Mom used that mirror her whole life.”
He explained that Grandma had brushed his hair in front of it when he was a child.
And later she'd done the same for me.
I could almost hear her counting again.
I asked Dad whether Brian knew the mirror's history.
“Enough of it,” he said.
I remembered telling Brian about Grandma during our first Christmas together.
I had told him about the summer after my mother died.
About the hairbrush.
About those mornings when Grandma never asked me to pretend I was all right.
Brian had held my hand.
He'd seemed moved by the story.
I believed him then.
Watching my father place the damaged frame inside the box, I wondered what Brian had really remembered.
Dad closed the cardboard flaps loosely.
He didn't want anything pressing against the broken wood.
We carried the box away from the middle of the room.
And for the first time since Monday, I could see the empty space on the wall where Grandma's mirror had hung.
Click here to continue reading: PART 3: My Father Arrived at Court Wearing a Suit, and My Ex-Husband’s Face Changed Before Anyone Explained Why He Was There
I Returned to the House My Ex-Husband Had Finally Vacated, but the Sound Behind My Front Door Told Me Something Was Wrong
Part 2 of 5
