But most of it was simpler: two people who had each been abandoned in their suffering, meeting in the middle of the night with nothing left to protect.

Ifeoma had spent months watching everyone she counted on peel away as she got sicker, until the only voice she could think to call in her worst hour belonged to a man who had already left her — and even he hadn’t answered, and the number had been wrong besides.

Emeka had spent four years discovering how thoroughly grief isolates a person, how the world’s patience for your pain runs out long before the pain does, how you learn to carry it alone because there’s no one left who wants to hear about it.

They recognized the loneliness in each other instantly, the way two people who speak a rare language recognize it across a crowded room.

And so they talked, a billionaire and an electrician, about the things people only say when they’ve stopped expecting anyone to stay and listen — his dead wife, her dying body, the specific texture of being treated like a memory while you’re still alive.

He did not talk to her like she was rich.