And he had told everybody we knew that I had been unfaithful.
I found that out from a woman I used to have lunch with, who rang me on the Thursday to say she was sorry things had gone the way they had and that she hoped I was getting help.
It went round faster than I could answer it.
Friends stopped picking up. Doors closed. People who had stood up and toasted our wedding in 2018 looked at the floor when they passed me in the supermarket, and one of them physically turned her trolley round.
So I took whatever there was.
At night I cleaned offices on the industrial estate, from ten until two.
Before sunrise I edited legal transcripts online at the kitchen table, which paid by the page and paid badly.
In the daytime I folded towels in a hotel laundry until my ankles swelled up over the tops of my shoes and I had to go down a size and then back up two.
Every pound went on rent, on the appointments I now had to pay for, and into a small folder under my mattress.
PART 2
Because he had forgotten something.
Before I became the quiet wife he wanted, I was a contract auditor.
Five years at Harrowgate and Vell, which is one of the most aggressive litigation firms in this city, going through the finances of men exactly like my husband for a living.
I gave it up in 2019 because he asked me to.
He said a Wrexham wife did not need to work. He said it at a dinner in front of his parents and his mother nodded, and I handed in my notice on the Monday, and I told myself for five years that it had been my decision.
He had never once asked what I actually used to do. He knew the name of the firm. He did not know what an auditor does.
And he was not careful.
When he locked me out of our money in a hurry, in a temper, on a Sunday night, he forgot that I had set up half the online banking in that house in 2018.
He left behind passwords. Transaction records going back four years. Invoices from three companies that exist on paper and nowhere else.
And a folder of emails between him and his mother.
The one I have read most is from the September. It is from Philippa and it is four lines long, and the second line is:
