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 my husband sat on a bed in Fennimore and read that sentence.

And he knew instantly, in about four seconds, exactly which page was not in that folder.

Because he was the man who had written the document it matched, in pencil, in a ruled column, eleven terms running.

And he said nothing.

Two years and four months.

Through about four hundred letters. Through seventy-two visits in that hall, across a table, four feet away from me.

Including every single one of the eleven months he did not have to be in there.

I asked him why, in that kitchen, on the eighth evening, and he took a long time about answering it.

And then he said four words: “Because of the rest.”

And when I did not understand that, he said it properly.

“Because I’d have had to tell you all the rest of it, Wren.”

Because if he had written to me from Fennimore and said Wren, put the September 2019 page back in the folder —