I walked through that small apartment reading it like a document, because that is what it was — the physical record of everything Amina had carried while I looked away.

Every object in it told the same story.

The mismatched chairs, bought one at a time from different places as she could afford them.

The bed she had repaired herself with metal screws rather than ask me for money I would only have had to request from my mother, who would have refused.

The refrigerator older than our marriage.

This was not poverty forced on us by circumstance; we had money, or I had earned money, more than three hundred thousand dollars of it, and my family had flown to Miami and bought designer bags on it while my wife screwed together our son’s broken bed by herself in a rented room.