He let strong men lift him and look away, embarrassed for him.

He let women he might have loved decide he was a friend and nothing more.

He gave up his own youth, entire, in a slow silent installment plan, spending it a day at a time on a debt I didn’t know existed and couldn’t have repaid.

And the cruelest part, the part he confessed to me only much later, was that the hardest thing to endure in all fifteen years was not the pretending.

It was watching me marry the man he knew had come to kill me, and not being able to say a word, because a warning I couldn’t yet prove would only have gotten us both killed faster.