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.

Tova wrote to me twice.

Once in the April and once in the June. Actual letters, because the internet in that house is my mother's and because after the church supper my wife had worked out that anything on that connection got seen.

Neither letter reached me.

Post from that house goes out of a box at the end of the drive and my mother walks to that box every morning at ten past eight.

I have not asked her about the letters and I am not going to, because there is no answer she could give me that I would be able to hold.

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PART 4 — THREE DAYS

The collectors came on the Tuesday. Not the sort with paperwork. The sort a small lender sells a file to.

They were at that door for about twenty minutes and my mother told them, in the doorway, that the wife handled the money.