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.

He ran that business off my internet. Eight months of it. The seller account's login history is a list of my own address.

Which meant, as Raisa put it in a letter that I have read perhaps thirty times, that the operation had been conducted from the marital residence throughout, and that the beneficial ownership of a business registered in his mother's name was going to be a matter for the court rather than a matter of paperwork.

Ilma was joined to the proceedings in the February.

She sat in a room in the March and answered questions about a company she is the sole member of, and it took about eleven minutes for it to become clear that she could not name a single supplier.

Wade's own numbers on that whiteboard were used against him, because he had written them himself, and because I had photographed them at twenty-five past eight in the evening in a room I had been given the keys to and told to clean.