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 has written eleven times. I have read four of them. None of them contains an apology to my wife and two of them contain a paragraph about what I have done to the family name.

I left the Army in the June. Not because of this, or not only. I had done fourteen years and there was a decision coming anyway and this made it for me.

We rent a place in Verrick now. Two bedrooms and a room at the back that Tova works out of, and she has eleven customers again and is fussy about who she takes.

Her hair is down past her shoulders. She had it cut properly about six weeks after, by a woman in Verrick who did not ask her one question about it and who has not charged her since, which I found out about a year later.

She kept the hair clip. She did not wear it for eight months and then one morning she did, and neither of us said anything about it.