In the beginning of all this — the court battles, the co-parenting chaos, the quiet moments of healing — there was Hanzie.

The boys’ beloved Mini Schnauzer. He barked at everything: the mailman, a gust of wind, the creak of a stair. Everything — except me.

For some reason, Hanzie took to me from day one. He’d run straight to me, tail wagging, and wrap his little paws around my neck like he was hugging me. And I swear, he really was. Melissa used to laugh and say, “He knows who the good guys are.”

Hanzie wasn’t just a pet. He was Nathan’s dog. The two of them were inseparable. When Nathan was having a hard day, Hanzie was there. When the world felt unstable or scary, Hanzie was the one constant — the one soft place to land.

During the early days of Melissa’s separation from Mark, she and the boys moved into a tiny, low-rent apartment — barely 800 square feet. Two bedrooms. No TV, no extras. Just enough. There was food in the fridge and love in the air, but not much else. It was survival.

Mark was failing to pay child support — sometimes short, often not at all, and always late — and Melissa was forced to choose between basic needs. Utilities were rotated. Sometimes the lights, sometimes the heat, sometimes the phone.

She did what she could: kept the apartment clean, kept the fridge stocked, kept the boys wrapped in as much normalcy and love as she could while hanging on by her fingertips.

But Hanzie — sweet, aging, loyal Hanzie — required more than she could give.

She groomed him herself, clipped his nails, fed him even if it meant less for herself. But vet visits? Specialty food? Emergency care? That wasn’t possible. She didn’t even have her own health insurance. She was relying on Washington State healthcare and substitute teaching calls that depended on whether her phone was turned on that week.

And still, she held out — trying to give the boys everything, including Hanzie.

But eventually, she had to make one of the hardest calls a parent can make. She couldn’t do both. She couldn’t feed the boys and the dog. It was a choice made in love, not in weakness.

So she asked Mark to take Hanzie — not to rehome him, not to sell him, but to keep him in the boys’ lives. To care for him when she couldn’t.

At that point, things with Mark hadn’t fully unraveled. She believed, or at least hoped, that when it came to the boys, he would do right by them. That he’d take care of their dog — their family.

So she brought Hanzie to the exchange. The boys were there. They knew what was happening. It wasn’t a secret. It wasn’t abandonment. It was a quiet, difficult choice made so their dog wouldn’t become another casualty of struggle.

And then, in true Mark fashion, the truth was rewritten.

He crafted a bizarre story on social media — claiming that Melissa had given Hanzie away to some random stranger on Facebook Marketplace. That the boys were devastated. That he, the noble and relentless hero father, took it upon himself to go on a one-man rescue mission to track down this random stranger and retrieve the dog — bringing Hanzie back to the family, triumphant and righteous.

The original video of Mark telling this story
https://www.facebook.com/VictoriousStephens/videos/577695345772185
Mark seems to have deleted this video. – Jul 14 2025

Because, of course, in Mark’s telling, this wasn’t just a dog — this was now the central plot of his own personal made-for-TV movie.

Let’s pause here and consider the sheer logistical miracle he’s asking everyone to believe:

Melissa supposedly gave the dog away to an unknown person on a massive online platform — in a metro area spanning nearly a million people, six counties, and two states.

And somehow, Mark, with nothing but sheer fatherly instinct and maybe a sprinkle of divine intervention, just happened to “find” this stranger and “rescue” the dog in a matter of days.

No address, no contact info, no paper trail — just pure paternal detective work! Cue the dramatic music, right?
In reality, you couldn’t recover a misdelivered Amazon package that fast, let alone locate and reclaim a dog from an anonymous Facebook Marketplace stranger somewhere in the entire Portland-Vancouver metroplex.

But this is what Mark does best:
📖 Craft a fantasy so implausible that it requires suspending every law of probability — while counting on the audience to nod along because it feels dramatic, righteous, and makes him the hero.

Never mind the facts. Never mind that Melissa handed Hanzie directly to Mark — calmly, lovingly, and in front of the boys, who witnessed the exchange themselves.

Mark didn’t just rewrite the story; he fabricated a legend starring himself. And like every good legend, it wasn’t burdened by the constraints of reality.

He told the boys that, too. Looked them in the eyes and told them a different story than the one they had lived through.

He hijacked the narrative. Again.

He turned a mother’s sacrifice into a weapon. A loyalty test. A performance.

But the truth never changed.

Melissa gave Hanzie up because she loved him. Because she loved the boys. Because she was surviving, and survival doesn’t always look noble — but it is. The truth is in the sacrifice: the quiet heartbreak of doing what’s right, even when it looks wrong to those who need a villain.

And still, Hanzie loved her. Loved the boys. Loved me.

Sometimes, when we all lived together in the Castle, I’d think about that little dog — the way he used to hug me, the way he’d look up at Melissa with trust in his eyes.

He was part of their story. A piece of their resilience. A reminder that love isn’t about perfection.

It’s about showing up, even when it hurts.