At Sunday dinner I watched my husband tear open a small white packet and stir it into my soup. I didn’t accuse him. I waited for four minutes, and then I swapped the bowls.

He was not trying to kill me.

That took me eleven days and two professionals to accept, and I still have to say it deliberately.

He was trying to make me unreliable.

Here is why.

That house has been in my sole name since 2011, along with an inheritance from my father that he has no claim on and has never had one on.

We have no children. There is no settlement that reaches it. A divorce gets him nothing.

But there is another route, and it is slower, and it does not require me to agree to anything.

It requires a paper trail. Eighteen months of one, ideally, with a doctor’s name on part of it.

I have read about it since, more than is good for me. It is not rare. There are people whose entire professional lives are spent on the other end of these applications.The woman I spoke to in the summer told me that the ones that succeed almost never involve anything dramatic.

She said: it is usually just somebody quietly being helpful for eighteen months.

Driving you to appointments. Answering for you when you hesitate. Mentioning, kindly, in front of a third party, that you have been forgetting things.

That is what I was. I was a paper trail being assembled at the rate of about two incidents a month.

And the incidents had to be real, which is the thing that took me longest to understand and which is the coldest part of it.

He was not inventing episodes and telling people about them.

He was producing them, and then letting other people notice, so that when somebody eventually asked has she been all right? the answer would come from his sister-in-law and not from him.

In a drawer in his mother’s sideboard there is an envelope.

A referral letter to a specialist, arranged by him, for an appointment I have never been told about.

And a half-completed application for a capacity assessment, with my name on it, in his handwriting, with three of the four sections done.The fourth section requires a medical opinion. That is the one he could not fill in himself.

That is what all of it was for. One section, on one form, that a doctor has to sign.

Six months of a woman’s life, and two appointments he drove her to, for one signature.