The convoy did not defeat them.

It made it impossible, for one morning, to keep not-seeing me.

And the deepest reckoning was not their humiliation but their sudden, forced comprehension that they had been living beside a stranger for years — a stranger they had felt entitled to diminish precisely because they had never bothered to know her.

That is what the woman three days a widow understood, standing barefoot on the cold tile as the diesel engines grew louder down the road: that she was about to be seen, at last, by people who had never once tried to see her, and that being finally seen was going to cost every one of them something they did not yet know they were about to lose.

Chapter 3 — Seven Months of Silence