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.

Then she took me down to the kitchen, put her arm into the rice bin up to the elbow, and pulled out a plastic bag with tape round it.

Inside was a notebook. A cheap one with a green cover. I gave it to her in 2016 when we were seeing each other, because she said she liked the paper.

She put it in my hands.

Eleven months of entries. Dates. Times. Names. Every envelope that came to that house and who opened it.

And on the fourth page, in her handwriting, underlined twice:

It isn't in my name. It's in his.

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PART 2 — THE CHURCH SUPPER

I met Tova in 2016 in Kellow, which is where my mother's house is and where I have been from all my life.

We married in 2018. She was twenty-six and I was twenty-nine.

We do not have our own place. That is the whole shape of this and I want it in early, because everybody's first question is why my wife was living in my mother's house.