The sadness was for the thing she had counterfeited.

She had shown me, for six months, a perfect imitation of the one thing I most wanted in the world, and I had wanted it so badly that I mistook the imitation for the real.

That is the particular cruelty of what people like Dulce do.

They do not merely rob you of money or even of safety.

They find the deepest and most honest hunger in you — in my case, the simple wish of a lonely old man to be loved again before he died — and they wear it like a costume and use it to gut you.

What I mourned, watching her go, was not my marriage.