My card was declined while I was buying nappies for my baby. My husband told me to figure it out myself. His mother called me a useless leech. So I rang my late father's banker and said one sentence.

And the option for immediate debt acceleration was sitting there.

A plain grey rectangle. Bottom right of the screen. Four words on it.

That is what the end of a marriage looks like, as it turns out. It looks like a button on a form, in a font nobody chose, next to a help icon.

My finger was over it.

PART 4

I did not press it.

I sat in front of that button for about forty minutes and I am not going to pretend it was a moral struggle for all forty.

For the first fifteen of them I was not deciding whether. I was choosing a moment.

I was wondering whether he would hear anything from the basement, or whether it would reach him by email at about six in the morning.

I was wondering whether Rosamund would be told that night or the next day, and which of the two I would prefer, and I had a preference.

I thought about the camel coat. I thought about three words in a supermarket and about twenty people hearing them, and I sat in my own kitchen with my finger on a button and I let myself enjoy it for about a quarter of an hour.

That is who was sitting at that table that night.

I would rather it was written down by me than discovered later by somebody else, and I am aware that writing it down myself is also a kind of move.

Then I scrolled down.

Not out of mercy. I want to be exact about this because it matters. I scrolled down to check that it would definitely work.

Because I am my father's daughter, and because a document with a button on it always has a schedule underneath it, and reading the schedule is the only genuinely useful habit I have.

Forty-one people are on that payroll.

I did not know the number. I would have guessed about twenty-five. I have been to the Christmas thing four times.

Garrick's brother. A woman in the office called Ottoline who brought me a chair in the eleventh week of my pregnancy when I was standing at a site visit and nobody else had noticed.

Four apprentices, which that company has carried since 2021 and about which my husband is unbearably pompous at parties and always has been.

It turns out he was pompous about the only genuinely good thing he has ever built, which is not the arrangement I had assumed.