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.”

And I did not go to another lawyer for ten months.

There was something in that file that looked bad.

I had found it eleven months before that, in the June of 2022, at my own kitchen table at about one o’clock in the morning with Theo asleep upstairs.

One page.

A trust account statement from the September of 2019, with four outgoing payments highlighted on it in somebody else’s yellow pen —

coded to a program that a board had voted to close in the November of 2018.

Seven hundred and twenty dollars in total. Four payments of one hundred and eighty each.

And a reference field on each of those four lines that was not a reference number.

It was a surname.

I sat at that table at one in the morning and looked at my own brother’s surname printed four times on a charity’s bank statement.

On a page, in a folder, that I had been carrying round to lawyers’ offices for four months.