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.”

That is what he told me at that table and he has not moved off it since and I have stopped trying to make him.

And then he said the other part, which is the bit I actually cannot get past.

He said: “And I’d have been asking you to put your brother’s name in front of a lawyer.”

And then: “You’d have done it. That’s the whole problem, Wren.

“You’d have done it that same week, and you’d never have told me what it cost you.”

The seventy-two thousand dollars is gone.

Most of it went on rent and on that boy. About eleven thousand of it went back into the case itself — copying, a transcript, four hundred dollars to a handwriting man in 2023 who told me nothing I did not already know.

He will not take one dollar of it back and he will not discuss it.

In the February I tried to put four thousand that I had put aside on that same table in front of him.