My Husband Wanted a Divorce Before Christmas.

He drew it up in November, in a week when the house was full of half-empty boxes he had ordered and then not filled, and he handed it to her over the kitchen island with the air of a man who had been told it was fair.

He would keep the house, because the house had been in his family, and because Vera could not afford the mortgage, and because the equity release would give her a modest amount that she could use to start again somewhere sensible.

Vera took the document to her own solicitor on the Thursday, as a formality, mostly to confirm that there was nothing to argue about.

Her solicitor read it for eleven minutes and then asked her a question that she had not been asked in seven years, including by the man sitting in her own kitchen.

“May I ask whose name is on the title?”

In December, he went to see a mortgage broker, because he was planning to refinance now that the property was going to be his. The broker pulled the register.

The register had been unchanged since the purchase.