I had imagined, in the vague way I imagined anything about our finances, that we were simply a young family being careful.

We were not being careful.

We were being robbed, and Amina was absorbing the entire cost of it with her own body and her own labor and her own sleep, so that our son would have a bed and I would have my illusions.

Standing in that apartment, still bent over my surgical wound, I understood that my wife had been performing a quiet, daily act of love for seven years — the love that keeps a child fed and warm no matter what it costs the one doing the keeping — and that I had answered that love by handing the means of it to the people determined to make it impossible.

Chapter 29 — I Don’t Expect You to Forgive Me Quickly

I lowered my head.