Either you go and clean my mother's apartment right now, my husband said, or tomorrow I file for divorce — six months out of work, living on my salary, saying it with a beer in his hand. I didn't argue. I took the keys and walked out. What was behind his mother's door turned that threat around on him inside forty minutes.

By the March I was working nine-hour days and coming home to two adults and a burgundy couch.

Ilma Ostrom, for the record, is sixty-one, in good health, and has a paid-off apartment on Pell Street and a pension from thirty years at the water authority.

She had told me the previous Christmas, in my own kitchen, that she had "nothing."

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PART 3 — WHAT WAS IN THE APARTMENT

Here is what was actually in that apartment on Pell Street, in the order I worked it out over about forty minutes.

A functioning e-commerce fulfilment operation.

Boxes of stock — mostly small kitchen goods and car accessories, the kind of thing that comes in on a container and goes out one unit at a time. About eleven hundred units on the shelving, at a rough count.

A workstation with two monitors, both awake, both unlocked.

A thermal printer with a roll of shipping labels in it and a stack of about sixty printed labels in the output tray, all dated that day.