Acting pursuant to Rule 34 4 of the Rules of the Supreme Court of Georgia, we granted the application of appellant Angela Buckner Wife for discretionary review of the trial court’s order denying her motion to set aside the consent final judgment of divorce entered in the action filed by appellee Mark Buckner Husband and denying her motion to rescind or reform the settlement agreement the parties signed. The record reflects that on December 20, 2012, the parties appeared for a final hearing on their divorce proceeding but continued to negotiate in an attempt to reach a settlement. On that day, the parties memorialized an agreement by using a letter that had been prepared by Husband’s counsel as a prior settlement offer and modifying it with handwritten notations in the margins and handwritten terms on additional pages. The document was then signed by both parties and their counsel, and counsel announced to the court that the parties had reached an agreement and executed a settlement memorandum. The settlement document was filed with the clerk but not read into the record.
The original settlement offer letter contained language granting Husband the “marital abode” and that language was not marked out or modified. Nevertheless, Wife claims that throughout the two and a half year period in which this action was pending, she unequivocally demanded to keep the marital home, which she had acquired prior to the marriage, and she claims she never consented to grant Husband the home at any time during the final settlement negotiations. In fact, she claims the agreement reached was for Wife to keep the home and that it was a mutual mistake that this term was not correctly reflected on the settlement memorandum. Later in the day on which the parties announced they had reached a settlement agreement, Husband’s counsel sent to Wife’s counsel a draft of a proposed consent final judgment and decree of divorce that contained not only the terms set out in the settlement memorandum, including the award of the marital home to Husband, but also contained what Wife asserts were additional substantive terms not addressed in the settlement memorandum. Counsel for both parties continued to exchange proposed drafts of the final order.
