My attorney moved first, and fast.

She filed an emergency petition for a temporary restraining order, alongside a divorce petition that laid out the full architecture of what had been done to me: physical cruelty, financial coercion, and breach of fiduciary duty, each of them documented, each of them backed by the package I had assembled.

And because the apartment had been mine, purchased in my own name before I ever married Luca, the judge granted an emergency motion giving me exclusive possession of the residence.

In a single afternoon, the home Luca thought of as his became, legally and completely, only mine — and he became a man who would need a court’s permission to so much as retrieve his own belongings from it.