My husband had me sentenced to ten years for a two-million-dollar fraud I never committed, and in the courthouse corridor he pulled my grandmother’s ring off my finger and told me to enjoy it. I didn’t argue. I handed a folded piece of paper to the guard.

I carried it.

I want to try to explain what that does to a person, because it is not dramatic and it is not one large thing.

It is that at nineteen you fill in a form that asks for your father’s occupation and you write not applicable. It is that at twenty-six a colleague says something about the Kaszuba tower and you say nothing. It is that at your own wedding there is one side of a room and one side of a church.

I did not tell Brett. That is the truthful and stupid centre of this whole account.

We were married seven years and I never told my husband who my father was, because my mother had told me at eighteen that speaking it out loud would cost her, and I was thirty-one and thirty-four and thirty-six and I was still doing what she said.