I made myself picture it, the yogurt, because I had never once let myself picture any of it before.

Seven years I had lived in the same small apartment as this woman and never seen what she was doing to keep us alive, because seeing it would have required me to admit where the money was going, and admitting that would have cost me my mother’s approval, and so I had trained myself, with great skill, into blindness.

But now Amina said it plainly — half a cup of yogurt, split with a spoon so that a growing boy would have something in his stomach — and the whole invisible architecture of her sacrifice rose up in front of me at once.

The secondhand clothes were not thrift; they were survival.

The mended shoes, the stretched food, the warm water she drank for dinner so Dev and I could eat: these were not the small economies of a careful woman.

They were the daily heroics of a person carrying an entire family on an assistant’s salary while her husband handed his own wages to people who flew to Miami on them.