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 hall was gone by the December. The trust had frozen every account it had. And he was in Fennimore by the November with twelve years in front of him.

So he did the only version of it that was still available to him from inside a prison, which is that he put the money in the hand of the one person left who was looking after one of those four children.

And then he spent three years, seventy-two visits and four hundred letters letting that woman go on believing it was a wage for pretending to be his wife.

I married a man in prison for two thousand dollars a month.

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