The Foreigner visited The Child twice after his return to The Netherlands. On the first trip, he came straight from the airport to my crummy apartment to see her, bringing toddler legos for her and my favorite Dutch candy for me. After she had been put to bed, he casually mentioned that he’d not yet booked a hotel.

I wished him good luck finding one.

The following year, he visited again, this time with a bicycle for The Child – now three – and more candy for me, but also with his new Dutch girlfriend. I allowed them to pick up The Child from daycare each day, as long as she was returned to me at a specified time each night. One evening The Foreigner asked for her U.S. passport so they could take a day trip to Canada, but before his plane ever landed I had given her passport to my coworker, who locked it in her desk drawer, promising to keep it safe from The Foreigner’s sweet-talking and my changes of heart.

He did not return her on time that evening; I called his hotel and learned he’d checked out hours earlier.

By the time he did return her, the police were at my apartment, taking information. They asked him questions, then told me plainly they weren’t satisfied with his answers.

Before leaving, the officer in charge said: I can’t tell you what to do, ma’am, but it’s important that you know what the police will and won’t do. One thing we don’t do is enforce visitation agreements. If someone wanted visitation enforced, they’d have to go to a judge, but, for example, if they came to the police station and showed us papers, we wouldn’t enforce that. I want to be sure you understand that, do you? Regardless of what anyone else might try to get you to believe.

I nodded and thanked him and did not deliver the child to daycare the next day.

The Foreigner showed up at daycare and made a scene, but left without seeing her again that day, or for the eleven years since.

Divorces don’t take very long when one party is willing to lose everything; The Foreigner’s need to return home was so urgent and focused that we actually breezed through the process fairly quickly. Mediating an agreement felt like a long time, but five hours to agree to the terms of custody isn’t actually long at all. The mediator split us up between two rooms, and spent most of her time in his, while I sat alone, flipping through a few People magazines and thinking how much more fun they were when Princess Diana was still alive.

There were two key items he was stuck on. The first was child support, which he’d discovered wasn’t an arbitrary amount that he just sent when he felt like it, but was actually an amount determined by a statutory formula, written into a binding agreement that was enforceable overseas. The other was The Child’s Dutch passport, about which he fought, apparently, long and hard. Everything depended on me signing off, immediately, on those papers, but I refused to sign and the mediator didn’t really ask me to: she just let me know it was a sticking point for him. Finally, I said, fine, tell him if he pays the child support on time and correctly every month for the first year, I’ll agree to cooperate in obtaining a Dutch passport.

I was surprised that he accepted that agreement. I was surprised when the child support was paid regularly for exactly a year.

I was surprised that at the end of that year, I was not presented with papers to sign to renew The Child’s Dutch passport.

When The Child was born, The Foreigner and I went to the local Dutch consulate and registered her birth: Dutch citizen born abroad. She was entered, with my written permission, into The Foreigner’s passport. I also arranged a U.S. passport for her, in spite of The Foreigner’s objections. We were planning a trip to the Netherlands, and he argued that she could both enter and leave both countries on just her Dutch passport.

I thought it was a bit odd that he would object to her having both of the passports to which she was entitled, and also thought it might appear a bit odd that a child of a U.S. citizen would not be carrying a U.S. passport when she re-entered the United States. The Foreigner argued the point, but then he argued about a lot of things, so I don’t remember the specific reasons he gave. In the end, we took the trip, and The Child entered the Netherlands on her Dutch passport. She re-entered the United States on her U.S. passport a few weeks after that.

A few days after our arrival home, The Foreigner announced he wanted a divorce, and since things hadn’t worked out between us, he had no reason to stay in the United States once we were no longer married; he intended to return to The Netherlands. My Best Friend had to point out to me that most people would consider their own child to be a good reason to stay anywhere, then urged me to hire a divorce lawyer who specialized in international divorces.

I thought she was being excessively dramatic, but she was insistent, and persuaded me that a consultation wouldn’t hurt. So I met with Portland’s pre-eminent international custody specialist divorce lawyer, and explained the situation. My husband was having a breakdown of some sort, I explained, but we weren’t really getting a divorce.

I don’t remember in detail what he said, except for this one thing: If The Foreigner took The Child to the Netherlands and there were no legal proceedings underway here, I would have a hell of a time getting her back. Then he explained the legal steps we could take to ensure her return if The Foreigner did take her out of the country. Finally, the attorney asked, if I prepare the papers, will you sign them?

That was the moment I decided to file for the divorce I didn’t really want: Losing The Child was a risk I was not willing to take.

In the back of my mind, the discussion about Dutch versus U.S. passports was playing, dim and garbled, but at some point it dawned on me that The Child could not have re-entered the country after our trip without The Foreigner, if she’d had no U.S. passport.

When I returned to the attorney’s office a couple of days later to sign the papers, I delivered two U.S. passports for safekeeping – mine and The Child’s. I had also checked the Foreigner’s passport, and considered asking the lawyer to hold that, too, except that I noticed a curious and helpful detail: it about to expire. He could, of course, renew his passport, but adding The Child to his renewed passport would require my signature.

The Foreigner presented me with the needed papers shortly after, and I was so stunned by the request that I signed them. But then, rather curiously and helpfully, The Foreigner left the signed papers sitting on his desk, like a trophy, for quite some time. I scratched out my signature when he was out walking the dogs one day.

The Foreigner didn’t notice, but the passport office did.

He was enraged, but there was nothing he could do to induce me to sign, or ever trust him again.

There wasn’t much trust left by then, of course.