The things we’re immersed in can be the hardest to see but the costliest to miss. He didn’t believe in love. She believed love came with an expiration date. They met in Munich in 1986 and agreed: no commitment.

Their relationship was like an Argentine tango, that rhythm of desire and doubt where one person moves forward, and the other pulls back, but always in each other’s arms.

Then they left everything behind and set off from Cairo to Cape Town on twenty dollars a day.

In Malawi, alone in a tent with only sixty dollars left, she contracted malaria and realized what her independence cost.

Some agreements weren’t meant to survive Africa.