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 I did not confront my sister.

That was Ilsa Braddock's advice and it was correct. There was nothing Margo could have said that would have helped me and one thing she could have done that would have hurt, which is start moving things.

I went back on the Sunday night.

The hardest thing I have ever done is get on a transport knowing what I was leaving my wife in the middle of.

She did not stay in that house. She was at her cousin Rhonwen's from the Thursday and she never went back through that door again except once, with a deputy, for a machine and two bags.

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PART 5 — ELEVEN ACCOUNTS

It took nineteen months.

All eleven accounts were resolved. Every one, cleared off my file, on the strength of a police report, a federal affidavit, and a notebook.

Not one lender fought it once they saw the notebook. Two of them settled inside six weeks. The longest took fourteen months and that was a purchased debt that had been through three hands.