My mother-in-law arrived with three suitcases and called the police to get me out of my own doorway. She handed me her potted peace lily to hold while she said it.

I put it on the kitchen table and I made a cup of tea.

And then I sat down and read it, which I did not need to do, and got to the part with my own name in it and Dalton's name underneath, and my chest did the thing it does.

I did not sign it. I put it back in the envelope.

I told myself I would do it at the weekend.

Then I put it in the second drawer of the desk in my office, underneath the warranty for the boiler, which is a place I would have to deliberately go.

Four years.

And in those four years I have opened that drawer perhaps a hundred times for other reasons, and I have known exactly what was under the boiler paperwork every single time, and I have shut it again.

I bought the house in Fernwick in 2017 with money my grandmother left me in 2016 and eleven years of my own savings. I met Dalton in 2018 and we married in 2019.

And every single time he has raised the deed — 2021, 2023, this February — I have said let me think about it, and then I have not thought about it, and then enough time has gone past that it would be strange to bring it up.

That is three times in four years that I let my husband believe I was considering something I had already decided.

And the honest part, which took me eleven months and a woman in an office on Hallet Street to get to, is this.

Some of it was 1999. Genuinely. I would get as far as the drawer and my chest would go.

And some of it was that I liked it.

I liked being the one who did not have to agree. I liked that there was one room in that marriage that I did not have to negotiate my way into, and I had watched his family for six years and I knew exactly what I had and I was not giving it up.

I was not protecting myself from Dalton for four years. By about 2023 I was keeping something.

PART 5 — THE PEACE LILY

Dalton and I are still married and I do not know whether we will be in a year.

He moved out for nine weeks in the September, to his cousin's, which was my idea and which he did not fight, and he came back in the November on terms that we wrote down on paper, which is not romantic and which has worked.