Neither of the people we resented and grieved existed.

We each loved the other, the whole time, exactly as much as before.

But we could not know it, because between us stood a woman handing each of us a portrait of a stranger and insisting it was the person we loved.

That is the deepest cruelty in this whole story, deeper than the stolen money, deeper even than the hunger: that two people who loved each other completely were made to believe, for five years, that the love had died, when it never had, when it was there the entire time, blocked, and starved, and lied about, but alive.

The money we got back.