In an adaptation from her new book, My Spirit Took You In, author Louise Troh recalls the day her longtime love Thomas Eric Duncan arrived in Dallas from Liberia, where she had left nine children behind to make a better life in America—and where Duncan had unknowingly contracted Ebola. As the country whipped itself into a frenzy over Duncan’s case, Troh and her family were supported by a very small group of members of their church. It’s a heartbreaking and honest story, gripping from beginning to end.

I stayed in a chair as Eric Duncan crossed my living room in Dallas. It was about 10 P.M. on September 20, 2014. I had not seen him in 16 years.

He was over six feet tall, with a shaved head. I am not such a big woman, five feet and four inches. I stood up and greeted him. “You are so big.”

This was not such a good thing to say for my first sentence, but it was all I thought of. He was so skinny when we met 20 years ago. At that time, Thomas Eric Duncan, known to everyone as Eric, was barely a man. Exiles on the run from the war in our country, Liberia, we lived with thousands of others in a refugee encampment in Danané, a city in the Ivory Coast. Then Eric was a kind almost-man growing into a gentle grown man.

Eric was one of many people I loved in my life, but always I loved him special. I can’t say why; it was like God picked us for each other. Our spirits knew each other from that first day when he called out to me on a dusty road in Danané.

In my living room Eric said, “I thought you would be bigger, eating all this American food.”

“You can’t eat everything here or you will be too big,” I told him.

We were nervous.

Eric’s face was broader now. He was older but the same. He had some gray in his beard, but when I looked at him I could see both men: the young one from the Ivory Coast and this older one, tired from his travels, who had wanted us to be together for so long.

When Eric came to Dallas I was afraid he would not love me when he saw how old I’d become. I was 54 years old, 10 years more than him. My legs hurt. Gray was coming into my hair. I worked as a certified nurse assistant at a senior living center. My hands were rough from so much Clorox, so many years of cleaning. Dishes. Pots. Sinks. Diapers. Toilets. Floors. Cleaning everything. And the next day, cleaning again.

In the Ivory Coast I was a woman who had to be tough, because I was a mother with children to feed. I was skinny then, legs like sticks, dried-out skin, refugee-ugly. I could not be gentle with the world. A mother must be a tiger so that her children can survive. A mother who has nothing to give her children must give them her whole spirit. She must never let anything scare her so much that she will not defend those she loves.

I learned these things from war and exile, and then from living in America, where life is good but not as easy as Liberians think it is. When I came to America in 1998 as a political refugee, I left Eric, our son, Karsiah, and all eight of my other children in Africa. Nine children, Americans say with wide eyes; they can’t believe it. I had 10 in all; now nine are living.