Alvarez’s suits, taken in again and again as illness took the weight off him — no. A whole winter of a family’s coats the year the father’s plant closed — no. Yusuf’s hems, every year, up and down as he grew — no, growing boy. Deja’s things — no, new mother. Page after page of it.

My wife had run a business for thirty-one years that was, I now understood, only pretending to be a business, and the pretending was itself a mercy, because it let people who could not afford to be given things instead pay for them, or think they had, or be let off in a way that never once felt like charity because Franny had the genius to make it feel like a favor between equals.

She had never told me because there was nothing to tell.

To her it was not a secret and not a sacrifice.