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If you are grieving, this book is for you.

If you have ever left everything familiar and started over in a strange country, this book is for you.

If you are a mother trying to hold it together for your children while quietly falling apart inside, this book is for you.

And if you merely want to know that faith can hold you even in the seasons when you cannot feel it, this book is for you.

There is no wrong way to read it. Come as you are. Take what you need. And know this: you are not alone. You never were.

Before I tell you what happened, I want to tell you who Adeniyi was.

Adeniyi Odunlami was not a footnote. He was a whole man; full, vivid, loud in the best possible way, and anyone who reads this story deserves to know something of who we lost before they hear how we lost him.

Adeniyi was larger than life itself. That is not a phrase I use lightly, or to romanticize a man I loved. It is simply accurate. He filled rooms with sheer, uncontained warmth, never performance or pretension. He was sociable the way some people are born sociable, effortlessly, genuinely, as though welcoming people was as natural to him as breathing. He made friends with anyone: the mechanic on the street, the CEO at the table. It made no difference to Adeniyi. He treated them the same.

He was generous, not in a careful, calculated way, but in the way of a man who genuinely did not keep score. What he had, he shared. What you needed, he tried to provide. There was not a single bone of envy in his body. I say that as his wife of fifteen years, having watched him celebrate other people's success with an openness that I think is rarer than we admit.