I didn’t push. I left her alone. I made her grilled cheese when she came home from school. I drove her to swim practice at 5:30 in the morning when Richard was too tired. I sat in the bleachers at every meet. I helped her with her geometry.
When she was sixteen, she got her first real heartbreak, and she came into my kitchen at midnight and cried on my shoulder for an hour. She called me Claire-bear that night. Just once.
Ezoic
I thought we’d turned a corner.
I didn’t know yet that her grandmother had been talking to her about me every single Sunday since the wedding.
The first crisis came three years into our marriage.
Cole Family Catering lost its biggest client, a hospital system that had been paying them to run three cafeterias. Overnight, a third of their revenue disappeared. Richard came home that night gray in the face.
