I understand your need to get advice from your lawyer. What I’m still genuinely stuck on is the idea that prior commitments and shared understandings don’t factor into fairness at all.

Taken to its logical end, that would mean a promise only matters if the other person still happens to need it when the time comes. But that’s not how fairness works. If I promise to pay you $10, I owe it whether or not you need the $10.

That’s why I keep coming back to the expectations we lived under during the marriage. Those understandings shaped real decisions, and fairness that ignores that isn’t fairness.