So call her.”

The memory of it hit me like a stone dropped from a height.

But before the memory, before the pain even, there was her calm, and I have thought about that calm more than almost anything else from that night.

A wife who still hoped, a wife who was still inside the marriage, would have panicked — would have run to the desk with her own card, would have wept, would have begged the family to come.

Amina did none of it, and her stillness told me, in the worst possible moment to learn it, exactly how far I had already pushed her.

She was not being cruel.