At first I thought it was another tax notice. Then I started reading the part about the land underneath the property, and my blood ran cold, but not from fear. From understanding exactly what my smirking husband had just handed me by accident.
The county assessor letter was about a reassessment, and the reason for it was buried in the technical language. The land under that old lake cabin, the crooked porch and tiny kitchen my husband thought was a burden he was dumping on me, sat on a parcel that had just been rezoned, and there was interest in it. Serious interest.
A developer had been quietly buying up lakefront in that area, and the little strip our cabin sat on was one of the last pieces they needed. The land my husband handed me to be spiteful, figuring the repairs alone would eat me alive, was worth many times what he had fought so hard to keep in those retirement and stock accounts.
He had done it to be cruel. Figured you would want it for sentimental reasons, with that little smirk, dumping the money pit on his worn out ex wife while he walked away with everything liquid. His lawyer smirked too. Neither of them had bothered to check what the ground under that cabin was actually worth, because they were too busy congratulating themselves.
I checked. I got the property properly appraised, and I talked to the developer myself, calm and unhurried, because I was in no rush and they were. And I sold that crooked little cabin, the one my kids loved and my husband sneered at, for a sum that made his hard won accounts look small.
I did not gloat to him. I did not have to. He found out the way everyone finds out these things in a small town, secondhand, and I am told the smirk did not survive the news.
I kept enough to set my children up for a long time to come, and I bought a better place on the same lake, with a kitchen that actually works and a porch that is not crooked, where my kids still get to have their summers by the water they grew up on.
He handed me the cabin to punish me, and never once looked under it. He fought for every account, every stock, the boat we used twice a year, and he let me keep the one thing worth more than all of it because he was too busy being cruel to do his homework. I got the sentimental little cabin. It turned out sentiment was the most valuable thing in the whole divorce, and he gave it away with a smirk.