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 the whole of what it was. There was nothing clever about it and nobody ever wrote a report on it.

It cost about three hundred dollars a term per child and it was free to the families, because that was the entire point of it.

In the autumn of 2018 the grant that funded that hall lapsed.

The board voted not to seek a renewal and to move the money into something that looked better in a report.

That vote is in the minutes, dated the fourteenth of November, 2018. Four voted for it. Three of those four still live in this town and I have seen two of them since.

Twenty-nine children came off that register in the January of 2019.

And Avram Loewe — who was the trust’s operations manager, and who had been standing in that hall himself four afternoons a week since 2014 —

kept four of them on.

He paid for those four himself. Out of his own account. Every term, for eleven terms, without missing one.