Chapter 2

“Ah, Mr. Avanti. Nice to meet you. Sana said that you’d be coming,” the attorney greeted me as I entered his main office after about twenty minutes or so of admiring the secretary.

I tried not to be too obvious, but hey, blondes ... what could I say?

“Sana?” I asked.

“Dr. Habib. I’m Yuri Natansky and you’re Simon Avanti, the man who was her patient last night, right?” the bald, goateed divorce lawyer confirmed.

“That I am. Look ... what my wife did last night ... it’s not simple adultery. She drugged me, hogtied me, and forced me to watch her do things that she always denied me, get this, not because I had broken my wedding vows. That would be bad enough and still an extreme overreaction on her part, but I had slept with a friend of hers BEFORE Danielle and I got engaged. Now, you tell me if that makes sense.

“If she behaves this way just six weeks into our marriage, what else do I have to fear? I no longer feel safe alone with her, and that’s no way to go forward in my life, always jumping and flinching, walking on eggshells, etc. No thanks. The sooner I can cut my losses, the better, you know. Don’t you agree?” I asked Mr. Natansky directly now.

“Indeed, indeed, but I want you to look into another option. Annulment. If you’ve already become this disaffected this early into a marriage, it’s much easier than at a later date to go ahead and annul the union. I believe that you entered this marriage in good faith, but perhaps she did not. Best part of annulment ... you don’t need her consent to annul it. You just need to get a judge to grant it.

“We can look into whether or not she withheld vital information about her mental health prior to marriage and whether or not you would have married her if you had that knowledge in the past. If that fails, of course, we can still go for the divorce,” Mr. Natansky had the look of a mad scientist in his eyes, but not a truly insane one, just one who thought something ingenious.

“That would be very nice, thank you very much. Now, regarding property settlements, there shouldn’t be a lot of marital assets, am I right, not this early into it, I would think,” I posed the obvious query about the likely fiscal hit that we’d both take.

“No, indeed not, and another factor to consider is that if she were to be, say, incarcerated for any length of time, it would give us an enormous structural advantage in terms of seeking our desired terms for a final settlement. From what I’ve heard, that seems to be a considerably high probability, which is one of the few upsides to the fact that what she did was, quite frankly, a violent felony.

“She could actually go to prison, and not necessarily for a short time, either. I don’t have to tell you, I think, that judges don’t tend to side with convicted felons in divorces. She might be lucky to have enough money for a prison commissary by the time that she finishes getting raped in such a divorce. It also helps that you don’t have kids together, either. No child support, almost no chance of alimony, best case scenario for her, she keeps the house in the divorce, maybe the car,” Mr. Natansky was thankfully ruthlessly frank with me now.

“Wow ... she really screwed the pooch, didn’t she?” I reacted with amazement at how much Danielle had put herself in serious shit.

“That’s being generous to her, but yes. Fear not, you’ll get a far more favorable divorce than the average man in this state. Or annulment, best case scenario. I mean, let’s be blunt here. Her crime, kidnapping, is actually a federal offense and carries with it a possible twenty-year term. Even in one of the nicer women’s prisons out there, with no federal parole, she’ll probably hit menopause behind bars, easily.