Three days after my twin sons were born, my husband brought twenty-two members of his family into a hospital room and offered me two hundred thousand dollars to sign away my marriage, my children, and my right to ever ask about their company's accounts. They expected me to cry. I read every page and signed all of them.

At the point I stopped counting, the trust account was one million four hundred and eleven thousand dollars short of the deposit liability the company was carrying.

Four hundred and eleven units of tenants' money.

Both signatories on that account are Caspian Thackery and Adelaide Thackery.

I went to Beatrix Nwankwo in the July at six months pregnant, and she brought in a forensic accountant called Mira Kazan, and the two of them spent nine weeks turning eleven weeks of my reading into something that would survive being looked at.

And then Beatrix told me to do nothing.

That is the part that mattered and it is the hardest thing anybody has ever asked me to do.

She said: you are six months pregnant, you live in a house owned by his family, you are employed by his mother, and you have no income of your own. If you file anything now, you will be out of that house inside a week, and they will spend the next two years telling a court that you are unstable and vindictive, and you will be fighting a custody case from a rented room.

She said: have your babies.

So I had my babies.

I want to describe those six months properly, because "she prepared" sounds like competence and most of it was not.

I lived in that house. Caspian was there four nights a week and at Marisol's the other three, and the cover story was a project in the north of the county, and I had known since the June and I said nothing.

I ate dinner across a table from that man about a hundred and forty times knowing exactly where he had been.

I sat on a sofa with his mother in the October choosing a paint colour for a nursery in a house I already knew we would not be living in.

There was a baby shower in the November. Thirty-one women. Adelaide gave a speech about welcoming me into the family properly at last, and everybody said how lovely, and I have the photographs and my face in them is completely normal.

Beatrix asked me at one point whether I could keep it up.

I said yes, and then I said the true thing, which was that it was not difficult, and that this was the part frightening me.

Because I had been doing a smaller version of it for two years already. Not confronting. Not asking twice. Letting a warm explanation sit where a straight answer should have been.