I came home eleven months early without telling anyone and found my wife sitting against a wall with her head shaved and her face bruised, while my mother shouted at me to throw her out. I didn't argue. I looked at what had actually been broken in that room, and then I asked my wife for the notebook.

That entry is why any of the rest of this worked, and she did not know that at the time. She wrote it because she had nothing else to do with it.

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PART 3 — FOURTEEN MONTHS

Here is what was actually happening, and the notebook has the shape of it and the rest came out afterward.

The debt is not my wife's and it never was. It is mine, and I did not take out one dollar of it.

Eleven accounts opened between the January of the previous year and the September. Two personal loans, four store cards, a line of credit, and four small instalment agreements of the kind you get from a dealership.

Everything an application needs about me was in a green folder in the bottom of my mother's wardrobe, because I have had my documents in that house since I was twenty-two.

Social security number. My old state ID. Two years of leave and earnings statements, which are the best proof of income a lender will ever see, because a serviceman's pay does not bounce.