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.”

The second reason is the one I did not go anywhere near until the January of this year.

In an office. On a Tuesday afternoon. With a woman asking me the same question four different ways until I stopped giving her the first answer.

My brother’s name was on it.

And if I handed that page across a desk, somebody was eventually going to ask me a question.

How had a fourteen-year-old in my care been attending a program through 2019 and 2020 that a board had voted to close in the November of 2018?

And I did not know the answer.

I had never asked. I had been told, once, by a woman on a desk, that it was covered. And I had taken that and gone home.

And at twenty-seven years old — four months behind on rent, taking two thousand dollars a month off a woman in a good coat to pretend to be somebody’s wife —