I had tried something with one of Misrak’s friends – a beautiful Ethiopian boy called Dawit who was all bone and limb, whose stomach was a cave of muscle. As long as he didn’t speak, I was content to look at his glistening body in bed, a rope of shells around his throat. With him I was someone else and it was this transformation I was interested in. When Dawit tried to tell me about his family back home, the words were so limited, so paltry, I had to tell him, ‘Shush, darling, you don’t need to talk.’

I’d come back to the apartment I shared with Misrak night after night, the place looking like some refugee camp. Ethiopians of every size sleeping on the couch and on the floor, all the groceries from the day before vanished, the kitchen in shambles. ‘What happened?’ I’d say, and Misrak, sitting in frayed lingerie, forking cheesecake from a Styrofoam box into her perfect mouth, would say, ‘These people are driving me mad. I’m like some mother hen for them. How can I say no?’

Spring arrived and when the winter fat did not fall off me I believed I was homesick and bought $5 phone cards to hear my mother shout down the line. ‘I can hear you just fine, Ma,’ I’d say, but she’d shout anyway, telling me about how the air conditioner in the guest room needed replacing and how her neighbour, Mrs Dalal, had bought a flat-screen TV.

Blake did not call. He did not once break our pact. I saw him fleetingly through the windows of the students’ centre. He was eating a burger with a stranger. Two decent-looking men wearing T-shirts and those stupid knee-length nylon basketball shorts. I ran past him, wondering what he was doing in Charlotte in the middle of the week, and who he was talking to. ‘I felt pangs,’ I told Misrak. ‘Like he was someone else, like everything we’ve already lived didn’t exist.’

Misrak blinked. ‘It’s all over in a second if you want it to be. You know that, right?’

Three months later we were married. I remember only Papi’s face as he passed me over to Blake at the altar. ‘Better take good care of her,’ he said, menacingly. And Blake, crinkling those eyes, ‘Of course I will, sir, of course.’

Later, in bed, ‘What did your father mean by that? What kind of man does he take me for?’

In the summer of our third year of marriage I began yawning. I’d sleep eight hours and still gasp for breath when I woke. As soon as one yawn escaped I’d start thinking of the next, and the next – the delicious reprieve. ‘Please don’t think you’re boring me,’ I had to tell people. ‘It’s some kind of neurotic tic, I can’t seem to stop.’