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 every single time I thought about raising it, I thought: I do not want to be the accountant at home.

That is the whole thing. That is the sentence that cost me three years and a great deal of money.

I did not want to be the woman who runs a household like a ledger, because I had watched my mother do exactly that to my father and I had promised myself at nineteen that I would never be her.

So I overcorrected into a woman who did not look at her own statements.

The first year was fine. It genuinely was and I am not going to rewrite it.

The second year, the business ideas started.

There were eleven of them. A subscription box. A supplements line. A consultancy that never had a client. A partnership with a man called Ordell that involved four thousand dollars and eleven weeks and produced a website that still exists.