Florence watched me from the porch.

“When you’re all on your own, Denise,” she said, “you’ll finally learn how brutal the real world is.” Then she closed the door.

I carried that sentence out the gate with me like a stone in my pocket, and for a while it did its intended work — it frightened me.

I was thirty-nine, out of the workforce for years, with a certification in caregiving and a modest half of a modest savings account, walking away from the only security I’d had.

There were nights that first month when Florence’s voice was the loudest thing in my head, and I lay awake wondering whether she was right, whether I had traded a difficult safety for a dignified ruin.