house again, he sought to engage her in conversation. “What happened to you that night?” he said. “I was going to die,” she said and dropped her eyes to the floor. Her words softened his shame. “Why?” Without hesitation, she told him she’d woken up the morning of the day before to find the world she’d so carefully built crumpled into dusty ruins. She had been crushed for two whole days by an e-mail from her betrothed, which had announced that he had married a British woman.
