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.

A courier collection schedule taped to the wall. Tuesdays and Fridays, eleven a.m.

And the whiteboard.

Monthly gross. Monthly units. Cost of goods. Three columns of returns. A running figure at the bottom right in a different colour.

I photographed all of it and then I stood in front of it and read it the way I read a set of management accounts, which is to say properly, for about twenty minutes.

Eight months of trading.

Gross revenue for the trailing eight months: one hundred and ninety-four thousand dollars.

Net, after cost of goods and platform fees and shipping, on his own numbers: somewhere around sixty-one thousand.

My husband had not worked in six months.

My husband had run a business out of his mother's front room for eight.

Then I sat down at that table and looked at what was on it, and that is where it stopped being about money.