Third night in, paint still in the air, boxes half unpacked in the hallway, and my husband standing barefoot on the marble with a beer telling me his parents and his newly divorced sister were moving in that day and that I was not going to make it an argument. When I said he had decided that without me, about my home, he laughed and asked whose home. Then he told me that anything I owned belonged to him too, that he made the decisions, and that if I claimed otherwise I should prove it.

I did not argue. Anger would have given him something usable. At two in the morning I opened the deed, the wire receipt, the title packet, the county recording, and my name sat on every page. Then I opened the relocation account and found twenty six thousand, fifty one thousand, and nineteen thousand gone, labelled family assistance and support for Delphine, before a single relative had set foot in the place.