PART 1
My name is Nessa. I am forty-seven years old.
Two years ago my husband ended a twenty-one-year marriage and left me rebuilding a life out of two suitcases, with our eight-year-old daughter in the back of a car.
Her name is Junie. She is eight, she is the only part of those twenty-one years I would keep, and she is the reason every single sentence in this account happened the way it did.
For most of that marriage I trusted Dermot completely.
The accounts. The savings. The house. Every financial decision in that family for about nineteen years.
Every document he slid across a kitchen table and told me was routine.
And I signed them. All of them.
Four at a time, sometimes, standing up, with a pen he handed me, while something was on the stove and Junie was doing homework at the other end of the table.
I did not read page two of anything for nineteen years. I want that written down plainly, because it is mine and it is not something that was done to me.
I signed because I thought that was what trust looked like inside a marriage. I thought asking would have been an insult to him.
I have since found out exactly what blind trust costs.
To the dollar — because a solicitor wrote the figure on a piece of paper and turned it round on a desk and slid it towards me, which is a thing I have now had done to me twice by two different men in two different kitchens, with two very different results.
By the time the divorce was finalised, Dermot had the house and most of twenty years of saving.
Junie and I had enough to begin again and not one thing more.
I found a small duplex in the September.
The rent stretched my budget about as far as it will go, and I took it anyway, inside about four minutes of standing in the front room.
It is not impressive and I am not going to pretend it is.
The floors creak in four places and I know all four. The kitchen is tiny — two people cannot be in it. The porch has needed painting since before I moved in and still does, and it is the only part of that house I have ever been glad about.
But Junie has her own bedroom with a door she can shut, and a window that looks at a tree.
