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.

Ilma's apartment is on Pell Street, four stops out, in a red brick block from the sixties.

I let myself in at twenty past eight in the evening.

There was no living room to clean.

There were boxes stacked to the ceiling down the whole length of the wall. There was a folding table with two monitors on it and a thermal label printer and a scanner. There was a rolling rack with poly mailers on it.

And on the wall over the table there was a whiteboard, four feet by three, covered in numbers in my husband's handwriting.

I stood in that doorway with my coat still on for a long time.

Then I put my bag down, took out my phone, and started photographing everything, because I have been an accountant for nine years and there is a part of my brain that does that before the rest of me has caught up.