Because for twenty-seven years, that three-mile walk in the rain was the dumbest thing I believed I had ever done.
I had given away bus fare I didn’t have, bread I needed, three days of survival for two infants, to a stranger under an awning.
I cried the whole way home — not out of kindness, but out of fear, because I genuinely did not know how my girls and I would eat that week.
We made it.
We always made it, somehow, on ramen and library paychecks and the stubbornness of a seventeen-year-old who refused to prove her parents right.
I finished school.
I raised my daughters — Mia and Claire — alone, and I raised them to be kind even when kindness was expensive, because it was the one thing I had to give them that cost no money and meant everything.
