At my divorce hearing the judge ruled I’d leave with nothing. My husband leaned down and told me to see how long I’d last. Then the courtroom doors went.

And then he said eleven words.

“Because until that morning you still had a husband and a house.”

And I said I did not understand what he meant.

And he said: “Anwen.”

And then: “If I’d come in 2022, you’d have had a choice.”

Which is the single most honest sentence that man has ever said to me.

And which cost him considerably more than the money did, and which he said anyway, and which I did not ask him to.

He did not wait sixteen years because of his wife.

Ilse Marrow has been dead for two years. He had eighteen months after that and he used none of them.

He waited until the exact morning a judge put me out of a house with nothing.

At thirty-six weeks. In front of a man who had just leaned down to my ear and told me I would be ringing him inside a week.