My competence had been an inconvenience to them, a thing to be managed and mocked, right up until the moment it became the load-bearing structure of my freedom.

They should have been kinder to the woman keeping the books.

People usually should be.

When we had bought our house nine years earlier, I had made the whole down payment myself, using an inheritance from my late grandfather.

And I had, at the time, quietly done the sensible thing of having the title deeded sixty percent to me and forty percent to Jason — a legal reality he had signed off on without a moment’s thought, back when he assumed that what was mine was his anyway and the paperwork was just paperwork.

We also had a prenuptial agreement protecting separate pre-marital property, which meant that the mountain cabin, inherited directly from my parents, was legally untouchable.