That belief is the last thing to go, and when it goes, a person is truly lost, because a body can endure almost anything as long as the spirit still expects a dawn.

My wife’s spirit had been under a five-month siege designed, whether my mother and sister understood it or not, to extinguish exactly that expectation — to teach her, through relentless cruelty and abandonment, that no one was coming, that hope was foolish, that she should give up.

And they had come so close to succeeding.

The fear in her voice when she asked where we were going was the fear of a woman whose hope had been beaten down so far that she no longer dared to expect good news even as her husband carried her into the light.

But the fact that the hope was still there at all, however faint, however buried under months of fear — that is the measure of how strong my wife truly is.

They laid siege to her hope for five months with everything they had, and they did not quite take it.