But I want to be truthful, because the truth is the only luxury I have never had to buy: there was a version of my life, real enough that I had let myself picture it, in which the man on that curb had passed.

In which he had heard his mother slide that paper across the glass and said no. In which he had taken my hand and told her that whatever I could or couldn’t pay, I was his wife, and this was my home, and the conversation was over.

That man would have woken the next morning to find himself married to someone who could give him not three thousand dollars but the world, and who would have done it gladly, and asked nothing but to be loved as the woman she was.

That man never existed.

But I had loved him anyway, the way you can love a possibility, and watching the real one stand weeping on the sidewalk, I grieved the imaginary one a little.

Then I let him go too.