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.

And the address on all eleven applications is my mother's house, which is the address on my licence, my bank, and my pay.

Nothing about any of it looks wrong from the outside. It looks like a captain in his mid-thirties borrowing money.

The applications were made by my sister.

The total at the point I came home was a hundred and eleven thousand dollars and change.

What it went on is the part I have had the hardest time with, because there is no story in it.

A car in the June, which she part-exchanged in the November. Eleven thousand dollars of what is described as travel. Around forty thousand to a man in Verrick called Dax Pelloe, who she has been with on and off for three years and who I have met twice.

And the rest of it just went. Clothes, meals, a bracelet.

My mother knew from the third month. That is not my guess. That is on page eleven of that notebook, where Tova records my mother saying to Margo in the kitchen, on a date, you said you'd stop after the car.