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 had given me three tulips from the supermarket by the station.

I did not make a scene. I changed the passwords, dropped the card limit to four hundred dollars, and stopped covering things I had been covering without ever having agreed to.

The card declined at a gas station eleven days later and he rang me from the forecourt.

"You humiliated me."

"Use your own money."

"You're obsessed with money."

"No. I'm the one earning it."

After that, everything got faster.

Ilma began ringing about her back, about a noise in the water heater, about a tap. One evening she asked me to come over and mop her bathroom because a plumber had left it in a state.

I said no.

Two weeks after that I got in from work at ten to nine and Ilma was lying on my couch — the burgundy one — with her feet up on my coffee table under a shawl.