Because to see my generosity for what it was, they would have had to see me, and to reckon with what they were taking from me, and that was intolerable, so instead they invented a wealthy Laura who could afford it all easily, a Laura whose sacrifices were not sacrifices, and they believed in her completely, because she let them keep taking without ever having to feel the weight of what they took.

And when the truth finally appeared, when Karla stood in my one-bedroom apartment and saw the folding table and the drying rack and understood that I had been giving them money I did not have, her reaction was not gratitude and not even shame.

It was a kind of vertigo, the disorientation of a person whose entire understanding of a situation has just inverted.

She had spent four years believing she was accepting help from someone who could spare it.