I want to come back to something you said — that whether what we had thought was planned “honestly” doesn’t matter to you, and that you want to decide fairness based on what we have and what we need.

I don’t understand how that works. The assumptions we made together about retirement shaped the choices we made during the marriage — how we used resources, and what we did not build separately. Fairness can’t just be a snapshot of where things happen to stand today. It has to account for the expectations and reliance that got us here.

So from where I sit, whether we planned to use your inheritance for retirement is directly relevant. When someone relies on a shared understanding and makes decisions accordingly, that reliance is a fairness issue. If it can simply be set aside after the fact, I don’t know what fairness means anymore.