I looked at my husband for a long moment.
And then I nodded and said: “Okay.”
That night, while he slept, I went into my office and opened the fireproof box.
The deed to that house. Bought in 2013, six years before I married him, in my name and nobody else’s. Under it, the agreement he signed in 2019 without reading past the summary, which says the house is mine separately, and which he called “paperwork” at the time and made a joke about.
No ownership interest. No right to stop a sale.
At 1:14 in the morning I opened an email to
Rosalind Awe.
I looked once at the man asleep in my bed.
And I pressed send.
***Subject: Sell. Immediately.***
What I have not told you yet.
And here is where I have to stop being the woman in that story, because that version of me has been going round for a year and it is not the whole of it, and I am the only person who can say so.
Four months before Bernice arrived with those suitcases, in the March, I was offered a two-year posting at our Ellisport office.
I accepted in principle on the eleventh of March.
I did not tell my husband.
Not in the March. Not in the April. Not in the May, when his mother came through my front door with a woman who was thirty-one weeks pregnant and a plan.
I had a start date. I had a relocation package sitting in a
folder on my laptop called Insurance, which tells you everything about me you need to know and which I named at half past eleven at night in the April.
So when I say I pressed send at 1:14 in the morning and set my life on fire — I did not.
I lit a fuse that was already laid.
And the three weeks, which I have described in four lines and which were eleven days longer than that.
Bernice got up at six. I get up at six. There is one kettle.
By the second week she had moved the mugs, the tea, the colander and the bin. Not maliciously — she would say, and she would be right, that the bin was in a stupid place.
