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.

It was the September.

He came home on a Thursday evening and stood in my kitchen and told me he had been let go, and his voice did a thing, and I put my arms around him and told him not to panic and that we would be fine.

He had resigned on the fourth. He had had that letter in a file for two weeks by then.

I made that man dinner on the night he told me. I remember what I made.

That is the one I have not put down yet, and my counsellor says it may be a while, and that a number on a whiteboard is always easier to look at than a Thursday in a kitchen.

---

PART 4 — RAISA TEAGUE

I did not go back to Fenwick Row that night. I checked into a hotel by the ring road with the clothes I had on and I sat on the end of that bed until about four in the morning with my phone in front of me.