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.”

Out loud. In a parking lot in 2022. In front of the woman he had just arranged to marry, who he had chosen off a register because that woman’s brother had been one of his four.

The other three children on that list are twenty-two, twenty and seventeen years old now.

I have not contacted any of those three and I am not going to.

That is not mine. It was never mine. Avi has asked me once not to and I would not have anyway.

Theo is nineteen now.

He is doing an apprenticeship out past Belgrave and he is better at it than he has been at anything else in his life, and his boss rang me in the June unprompted to say so.

I told my brother in the November, at that same table, with the box still in the flat.

All of it. Including the page in the drawer under the kettle, which is the part I had to make myself say and which took me two attempts.