Peter the Apostle came with a calculator. How many times should I forgive my brother—up to seven? It is a reasonable question, the question of a man who wants a rule he can follow and a number he can reach. Most of us arrive at this subject holding the same calculator. We want to know what a grudge costs, whether the cost is worth it, and how much longer we are obliged to keep paying.

The answer Peter received was not a larger number. It was a story about a man forgiven a debt no accountant could total, who walked out into the courtyard and took a colleague by the throat over a sum he could have written off without noticing.

Anna Kriger takes that story seriously as a story—not as an illustration of something else, and not as ancient packaging around a modern insight. She also takes Tuesday seriously: the sister who has not called, the argument rehearsed in the shower with someone who has not thought about you in years, the case still open against a man now twenty years dead. This book insists on holding both, and refuses to let the listener choose between them.

It is unsparing about what resentment costs and equally unsparing about the fact that cost is not the reason to let it go. Forgiving in order to feel better is still bookkeeping, with the profit merely moved to your side of the ledger. The servant in the story was not offered a better rate of interest. He was offered cancellation—and did not understand what he had been handed, which is why he went out to collect.

For listeners who arrive carrying something small and stubborn, and for listeners who arrive carrying something that cannot be repaid in any currency at all, this is a book about the debts that only forgiveness can close, and about what forgiveness does not do: it does not undo, it does not reopen the door, and it does not run on a schedule. It only stops the second payment—the one you have been making, out of your own pocket, ever since.