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.”

His mother is Vesna Loewe. Sixty-three. The coat was real.

And I married that woman’s son through scratched glass in the visits hall at Fennimore.

With a guard at the end of the row watching a clock. On the fourteenth of March, 2022, which took about eleven minutes.

I expected him to be angry.

Or flat and dead behind the eyes. Or one of those men who has decided somewhere in year two that the world owes him something and who makes you pay the interest on it.

Instead Avram Loewe was kind to me from the first visit.

He remembered my brother’s birthday in the June.

I had mentioned it once, in passing, in the April, as a reason I could not come on a particular Saturday. He had a card sent.

He asked whether I had eaten.

Every single time. Before anything else, before hello properly, every visit for three years. Seventy-two times.