I married a man in prison for money. Three years later his conviction was overturned — and eight days after he came home he put a black box on the kitchen table and said, “Now it’s my turn.”

PART 1

“Two thousand a month. See him twice a month. Write to him. Show that court he’s still got a family.”

A woman in a good coat said that to me across a table in a coffee place on Carrow Street, and I said yes before I had time to be ashamed of it.

My name is Wren Kovac. I am thirty years old.

When that conversation happened I was twenty-seven years old.

Four months behind on rent. Working two jobs, one of which was nights at a place on Fennimore Street.

And raising my brother Theo on my own since our mother went in the August of 2019.

Avram Loewe was serving twelve years for taking money out of his own family’s charity.

I did not care whether he did it.

I want that down first, in a flat sentence, with nothing around it.

It is the honest starting point of the whole of this, and everything that comes afterward only means anything if you know exactly what I was when I sat down in that coffee place.