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So was her last-born, a 1-year-old.

“What for you,” my mother would say, taking my face in her hands, “my last-born, my baby? Four dowries is too much for a man to bear.”

Stefanov says that in the traditional communities in that part of the world, regardless of the religion or ethnicity, "there is an unwritten rule that the last-born female child stays with the parents until their death".

There was a time one would have received a bright and intricate response that would in turn have unfolded silly and weighty questions to which Emily gave her best answers; and while the meandering hypotheses they indulged were hard to recall in detail now, she knew she never spoke so well as she had to her eleven-year-old last-born.

“Sam was my last-born child,” she said.