A poor, overweight orphan girl is forced into marriage with a homeless man; a few days later, he arrives in a Rolls-Royce.

A poor, overweight orphan girl, forced into marriage with a homeless man; a few days later, he arrives in a Rolls-Royce.

In the remote reaches of the village of Adabe, where the red earth clings fiercely to the sandals of passersby and where the sun seems to burn with a crueler intensity than anywhere else, stood a small cement house with cracked walls and a sagging zinc roof. This was where Amara lived. The house leaned slightly to one side, as if it too were exhausted from standing, like the young woman who lived there. Amara was twelve years old when the accident happened. She remembered it in painful fragments: her mother’s laughter in the front seat of the bus, her father’s promise to buy her fried plantains when they arrived, then the screech of tires, a scream that was inhuman, and finally, silence.