Every month for four years I had performed an act of love: I had taken money earned in danger and sent it home to keep my wife safe.

And every month, that act of love had arrived home and been transformed, by the people I trusted to receive it, into another brick in the wall around her.

My diligence funded her prison.

My sacrifice bought her captors their comfort.

The better a husband I tried to be from ten thousand miles away, the worse my wife’s situation became, because there was simply more money for my mother and sister to steal and more incentive to keep the sick woman quiet and hidden so the theft could continue.

Do you understand the horror of that?