“In that panic I convinced myself that this was all my fault; had I not come here under false pretenses, the lie that was my photograph? Did my husband not have the right to be disappointed in me? And I had been callow and stupid to criticize him. I thought of the night a week before when he praised the meal I had cooked and had allowed me to sit and eat with him. He was not a bad man; I was a bad wife. I would have to become a better one, that was all. It was the only way I could walk back into that little bungalow: to embrace the illusion that I could somehow change the situation, that I had some say over it. To admit that I had no say—that was too terrifying to contemplate. And so I sat there on the ground, weaving an illusion from strands of desperation, until at last I got up and started the long walk back to my husband’s house.”