My mother-in-law turned up on my porch with three suitcases and called the police when I wouldn’t let her in. Then the officer asked my husband one straightforward question about who owned the house — and the silence that followed was the ugliest thing I have ever stood through.

What I will put down is that he did not deny the forty-one thousand and he did not deny what he had told her.

What he said, at about half past midnight, was: “She’d never have given it to me for a debt.”

And I said, “So you told her it was for a house you don’t own.”

And he said, “I was going to fix it.”

Six years.

I told Norma myself.

Not through a solicitor and not by message. I drove to her flat on a Sunday in the November with the land registry entry, the 2016 completion statement and nine years of mortgage records in a folder, and I sat at her kitchen table and went through it with her for an hour and a half.

She did not believe me for about forty minutes.

Then she stopped arguing and went quiet and asked me to leave the folder, and I did.

That was the worst hour of that entire year and it was harder than the path and harder than the kitchen at two in the morning, because I have never in my life had to do that to anybody.

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PART 5 — SHE HAS NOT SPOKEN TO ME SINCE

Norma Delaine instructed a solicitor in the January.