I was remembering a dinner in Indiana, three years earlier, at their table.

My mother-in-law had pointed her fork across the roast at me and informed the assembled family that I was a useless, unemployed wife who could not even manage to give her son an heir.

Alejandro had laughed along and added his own line — that without his salary, I would not know how to pay an electric bill.

And I had sat there, and smiled, and said nothing, and driven home, and the next morning I had wired the money that kept that man’s workshop from closing, from my private account, without a word.

I had thought, at the time, that this was grace.

I understand now that it was something closer to self-erasure.