But there is no such thing as a clean transaction when one person holds the other’s hair back at three in the morning.

The arrangement had thrown them into the least performable circumstances a human being faces: sickness, fear, the body’s failures, the small humiliations of a life that has stopped obeying.

And you cannot fake your way through those.

You can fake affection at a dinner party.

You cannot fake the particular gentleness required to help a proud woman who cannot climb her own stairs, or the particular steadiness required to sit with someone through the terror of a spiking fever, and so the things that grew between them grew in exactly the places pretense could not reach.

Emeka found that Ifeoma, stripped of the wig and the suit and the fortune, was funnier than the boardroom version, and more frightened, and kinder.