And then, two years ago, Claire got sick.
I won’t walk you through all of it.
If you’ve ever sat in a hospital billing office with a calculator and a prayer, you already know.
If you haven’t, I can’t explain it in a way that would be fair.
I only know that at forty-four, I was exactly where I’d been at seventeen — drowning, counting dollars, working nights, refusing to quit — except now the stakes weren’t ramen.
They were my daughter’s life.
That was the morning the man in the charcoal suit walked into my little office and set a weathered box on my desk and said a name I had not thought about in years.
Samuel.
I want you to understand that I had never once, in twenty-seven years, expected anything back for that ten dollars.
I had written it off as the price of being the kind of person I wanted to be.
