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 did none of those things. She just looked up at me.

I am not going to be able to describe that look properly. It was not guilt. It was a person who had stopped expecting anybody to believe her, and who had got to that point some time ago.

Here is what I know about Tova Solheim.

She sews for people out of our back room. She has worn the same grey coat since 2019 and has repaired the pocket of it twice rather than buy another. She argues about forty cents at a market stall and enjoys it.

Had that woman borrowed a hundred thousand dollars to spend on herself?

So I stood in that front room and I looked at what had actually been broken.

The television was fine. The refrigerator was fine. My mother's dinner service, which is the only expensive thing in that house, was sitting behind glass in the cabinet without a mark on it.