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.

The name did something to his face, because that name does something to everybody’s face in Halverston. Anders Kaszuba owns construction companies and industrial parks and four hotels, and the paper called him the man who built half this city in a headline in 2011 and it stuck.

“Why would I believe that?” he said.

I looked straight at him.

“Because when you say my full name to him, he isn’t going to ask you a single question.”

They put me in the van.

For the first twenty minutes of that drive I was certain he had put the paper in a bin, and I would not have blamed him.

Forty-one minutes out, at the gate of the intake facility, the van stopped and did not move again.