And the floor dropped out of me completely, and I understood, at last, the thing I had been too frightened and too wrong to see.

The bicycle in the window.

All those months of my son standing at that glass, memorizing a bike he would never let himself buy.

I had thought he was a boy gazing at a dream he was slowly saving toward.

He was not.

He was a boy looking at the thing he had chosen to give up, week after week after week, so that his mother would not lose her home.

He had not been saving for that bike.