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.

I have asked her, since, why she did not simply leave.

She has given me three answers over two years and all three are true.

The first is that she had eleven hundred dollars. That is what a woman who sews out of a back room and hands over three hundred a month has after six years, and it is not enough to put a deposit on anything in Verrick.

The second is that her mother died in 2017 and her father is in a place in another county with a condition that means he has not known her since 2021, and she has one cousin, and that is the whole list.

And the third is the one that took her longest to say.

She said, "Because you'd have had to choose, and you'd have been six thousand miles away when you did it."

She had worked out by about year three that if she told me properly, I would have to pick between my wife and my mother from a phone in a place where I could not do anything about either of them for another seven months.