This was a real smile, unguarded and warm, the smile of a woman who was, in that terrible moment, with a razor at her scalp and her life running out, somehow not alone.

I understood, watching it, that I was seeing something I had not provided and could not have provided, because I did not possess it to give.

Whatever was passing between those two women in that room had no price and no substitute, and it had grown up quietly in my house, in the hours I was never there, tended by a stranger in a servant’s uniform while I was off defending an empire I had told myself I was building for exactly this — for my family, for my mother, for the people I loved and did not sit with.

I stood at the door and I did not go in.