Stolen money can be recovered; I would recover it.

But you cannot recover the four years I spent believing a lie, or give back to me the version of my own family I had loved, who, it turned out, had never existed.

That is gone.

They spent it, along with the money, and it does not come back.

And yet — and this is the thing I held onto, that morning, as the stone sat in my chest — my wife had survived.

Against all of it, against the disease and the cruelty both, she had refused to die.