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.

Four weeks after he told me he had been let go.

The summary sets out, in numbered points, what a client had asked about. Marital property in a jurisdiction where the family home was acquired before the marriage. Spousal maintenance. The relevance of the duration of unemployment and the disparity in earnings.

There was a handwritten note in the margin in his writing next to the maintenance paragraph.

It said: 12 mo min.

Twelve months minimum.

And behind that letter, at the very back, was a photocopy of a letter he had written to his employer.

It is a resignation. Two paragraphs. Dated the fourth of September, effective immediately.

He was not let go.

He resigned. Four weeks before the consultation, at the point where the fulfilment operation had four months of trading behind it and was making money, and he moved the whole thing into his mother's name and then came home and told me he had been restructured.