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.

She was not building a case. She had no idea a case was a thing you could build.

She wrote in it because there was no other adult in that house she could say any of it to, and because my great-uncle had been told at a church supper that it was not her concern, and because two letters she wrote to me never arrived.

Ninety-one pages of a woman talking to nobody.

Margo pleaded in the spring of last year. Identity fraud and the rest of it. She is serving a sentence and there is restitution running that she will be paying until she is forty-one.

My mother was charged over the Tuesday. That went to trial because she would not accept it, and she was convicted, and she is sixty-three and it is probation and a restraining order and a conviction that everybody in Kellow knows about.

I have not spoken to my mother since the Thursday morning in her kitchen.