She had brought it from Poland in 1952.
It was the only piece of jewelry I owned that had weight to it.
Not monetary weight.
The other kind.
I looked for it everywhere.
It was not everywhere.
It was gone.
And then in April the savings were gone.
And nobody believed me.
Not the bank.
Not Thomas’s family.
Not even my lawyer, entirely.
Because the evidence was the evidence.
And evidence, in the absence of a counter-narrative, is what is believed.
I was the nurse who had stolen from her own account.
I was the nurse who was now claiming she hadn’t.
I was, in the language of the divorce proceeding Thomas had initiated, an unreliable narrator of my own life.
I have spent the past six months being very quiet.
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Very still on the outside.
Very fast on the inside.
Waiting.
The hearing was on a Tuesday in October.
