But once he was stopped, dwelling on him would only have let him go on taking from us, this time from the inside.

So we stopped him through the law, and then, as much as we could, we turned and put our backs to him, and gave our attention to the thing that actually deserved it, which was my mother’s life beginning again.

The legal process took the better part of a year.

Gavin’s lawyers tried, predictably, to reframe the whole thing as an ordinary marital dispute over shared assets, two spouses quarreling over money.

But our documentation told a very different story, and it told it in his own words and his own handwriting, and documentation like that is very difficult to argue with.