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.

And there was one Sunday in the June, about two-thirds of the way through, when I sat on my own kitchen floor and seriously considered dropping all of it and signing whatever he wanted, because I had reached the point where the money had stopped meaning anything and I simply wanted the thing to be over.

I rang my sister and did not tell her why I was ringing and we talked for an hour about her kitchen extension.

Then on the Monday I went back to work.

Here is roughly how the rest of it went, without the parts Raisa would not want written down.

The photographs got us a preservation order and then discovery, and discovery got us the platform account, which was in Ilma's name but which had been accessed for eight months from an IP address that resolves to my apartment on Fenwick Row.

That is the detail I did not see coming and the one that mattered most.