Because what I was proposing, and what he agreed to inside four seconds because he could see exactly what would happen if he did not, was that a woman with no money and two children would perform unpaid domestic labour in the house of a man she barely knew in exchange for shelter.

He knew what that was.

I did not, because I had been doing precisely that for eighteen years in a different house and had called it a marriage.

He said yes because the alternative was me on a step at midnight, and then he spent the following nine months quietly and methodically taking it apart.

He started paying me in the third week.

Not much — he called it a housekeeping stipend and it was about what the agency he had used twice a month charged, and he put it in an envelope on a Friday and I tried to give it back and he said, “Evelyn, this is a wage, and refusing a wage is the thing you’re supposed to have stopped doing.”