“My whole life,” I finished for him, and he threw his head back and let out his own cock-a-doodle-doo until I stopped his mouth with a kiss that lasted until the world lit up all around us.

We never went home that night, to his or mine. We were both at our desks by nine. But within a month his home was mine. Within a year we were married.

I PULLED ON my coat and glanced up at the window, where a parade of legs passed by. This was how I checked the weather each day, gauging the temperature outside by the proportion of bare legs and the precipitation by the splash of feet past the window. We didn’t have a TV or Internet connection or even a landline telephone. Those were all things that were hard to get after your credit was destroyed by million-dollar debts. “It’s like we’re Amish,” I joked the day we moved into the basement studio, but David didn’t laugh. He didn’t find me funny anymore. Or anything else.

It shouldn’t have been so hard to be poor again, not when we’d been rich for only a tiny fraction of our lives. By balance-sheet measures, we’d never been rich at all, or even solvent. But poverty was harder the second time around. Crueler. To have things, then to not have them. To be admired, then ignored. To be full of promise, then empty of everything but regret.

I WATCHED THE feet of the world pass by. Men and women striding purposefully to work, to shop, to learn, to prosper. Everyone else had recovered from the Great Recession. They’d been retrained, landed new jobs, had their debts forgiven. The banks and insurance companies and automakers were bailed out to the tune of $700 billion. Too big to fail, they were called.

But I was small. Small enough to fail, and I did, spectacularly.

Outside, the legs were sloshing through puddles, and I picked up my umbrella and left.

THAT OTHER DECEMBER 19. We bounded out of our building hand in hand into the bright cold morning. The shopkeepers and doormen waved and smiled at us as we strode down the block. We were the golden couple of Chelsea, and so alike, David with his sun-bleached hair, me with my two-hundred-dollar highlights, he in his Hugo Boss topcoat, me in my belted alpaca from Barneys. At the corner we hailed a cab for our commute down to Wall Street, and one obligingly stopped beside us, our chariot awaiting. We got on our phones as we rode, David texting, me talking, our free hands entwined on the seat between us. My stop came first. A quick kiss goodbye, then he said it again. Don’t be nervous.

I should have realized then, but I didn’t, not until I arrived home in the middle of the afternoon. I unlocked the door and stopped short when I heard music playing in the living room. Bags of shopping sat on the kitchen counter, a magnum of champagne, a wheel of Brie, a dozen red roses.