PART 3 — WHAT WAS IN THE APARTMENT
Here is what was actually in that apartment on Pell Street, in the order I worked it out over about forty minutes.
A functioning e-commerce fulfilment operation.
Boxes of stock — mostly small kitchen goods and car accessories, the kind of thing that comes in on a container and goes out one unit at a time. About eleven hundred units on the shelving, at a rough count.
A workstation with two monitors, both awake, both unlocked.
A thermal printer with a roll of shipping labels in it and a stack of about sixty printed labels in the output tray, all dated that day.
A courier collection schedule taped to the wall. Tuesdays and Fridays, eleven a.m.
And the whiteboard.
Monthly gross. Monthly units. Cost of goods. Three columns of returns. A running figure at the bottom right in a different colour.
I photographed all of it and then I stood in front of it and read it the way I read a set of management accounts, which is to say properly, for about twenty minutes.
Eight months of trading.
Gross revenue for the trailing eight months: one hundred and ninety-four thousand dollars.
Net, after cost of goods and platform fees and shipping, on his own numbers: somewhere around sixty-one thousand.
My husband had not worked in six months.
My husband had run a business out of his mother’s front room for eight.
Then I sat down at that table and looked at what was on it, and that is where it stopped being about money.
There was a lever arch file. Not hidden. On the table, standing up against the monitor.
In it, in order:
The business registration for Northrun Supply Co. Sole member: Ilma Ostrom. Registered address: the apartment on Pell Street. Formation date the previous August.
A business bank account in the name of Northrun Supply Co., signatory Ilma Ostrom, statements for eight months.
An invoice from a company formation service for one thousand five hundred dollars, dated the twenty-ninth of August.
I had asked Wade about fifteen hundred dollars in the September. It had gone out of the joint account and I had noticed it, and he had told me it was the transmission on his car, and I had said fine and closed the app.
And under all of that, at the back of the file, was a copy of a letter on a law firm’s letterhead.
An initial consultation summary from a family law practice in Harrowgate, dated the eleventh of October.
Four weeks after he told me he had been let go.
The summary sets out, in numbered points, what a client had asked about. Marital property in a jurisdiction where the family home was acquired before the marriage. Spousal maintenance. The relevance of the duration of unemployment and the disparity in earnings.
There was a handwritten note in the margin in his writing next to the maintenance paragraph.
It said: 12 mo min.
Twelve months minimum.
And behind that letter, at the very back, was a photocopy of a letter he had written to his employer.
It is a resignation. Two paragraphs. Dated the fourth of September, effective immediately.
He was not let go.
He resigned. Four weeks before the consultation, at the point where the fulfilment operation had four months of trading behind it and was making money, and he moved the whole thing into his mother’s name and then came home and told me he had been restructured.
He needed to be a man with no income living off his wife’s salary.
Not for six months.
For twelve, minimum.
I sat down in his mother’s chair for a while after I understood that.
What I felt first was not anger. It was something closer to professional recognition, and I am not proud of it.
Because it was a good plan. It would have worked. Twelve months of documented unemployment, a wife on a senior salary, an apartment she brought into the marriage but that he had lived in and maintained for three years — and every dollar of his actual income sitting in a sixty-one-year-old woman’s account with her name on the registration.
If he had run it four more months and kept his hands off my internet, I would have paid that man maintenance.
The anger came about ten minutes later and it was not about the money either.
It was the September.
He came home on a Thursday evening and stood in my kitchen and told me he had been let go, and his voice did a thing, and I put my arms around him and told him not to panic and that we would be fine.
He had resigned on the fourth. He had had that letter in a file for two weeks by then.
I made that man dinner on the night he told me. I remember what I made.
That is the one I have not put down yet, and my counsellor says it may be a while, and that a number on a whiteboard is always easier to look at than a Thursday in a kitchen.
