He had changed the locks on the house while I was at work — I came home to a key that no longer fit a door I had paid half the mortgage on.

His lawyer’s email arrived that afternoon, a cool and lawyerly document explaining that I had voluntarily abandoned the marital residence, which was a strange thing to read while standing on the porch of the marital residence, locked out of it.

He even kept the car.

The title, it turned out, sat in his company’s name.

Everything did.

I had spent six years thinking we were building a life together, and it emerged, all in a single day, that I had been living inside a structure with only one name on the deed.