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.

I did not ring him. He rang me eleven times between ten and midnight and then stopped, and I have thought since about what stopping at midnight tells you.

On the Monday I took the morning off and sat in the office of a family attorney named Raisa Teague, who is forty-eight, and I put my phone on her desk and turned the photographs around one at a time.

She looked at them for about six minutes.

Then she said, "Mrs. Vasko, do you understand what you have?"

I said I understood the numbers.

And she said, "The numbers are the second thing."

The first thing, she said, was the letter.

Because the entire structure of what he had built rested on one representation — that he was an unemployed man with no assets and no income — and that representation was false, and he had it in writing, in his own hand, on his own table, in a file with a resignation letter behind it.