I Came Home Unannounced After Four Years Abroad and Found My Wife Starved and Shaved in the Backyard. My Mother Said She’d Brought It on Herself. I Didn’t Yell

“And we didn’t,” Selina said.

“We went without nothing.”

I looked at Phedra — at her stubbled scalp and her hollow cheeks and her broken sandals — and then back at my mother.

“She did,” I said.

Godfrey found his voice from across the room, blustering that none of this would have happened if I hadn’t left in the first place, as if my leaving to earn the money they had stolen were the true crime here.

Selina fell back on the sentence she had clearly decided to die on: that Phedra had brought every bit of this on herself.