It was only years later, standing on a stage saving eight hundred of those livelihoods, that I understood she had been perfectly literal.

The people ran through me now.

Every careless decision I might make would land on someone with a mortgage, and every careful one would too, and that was not a burden she had laid on me so much as a truth she had simply, finally, named.”

And she had said one more thing, from that hospital bed, holding my hand with a grip that had no business being as strong as it was.

“Never let a man make you feel small,” she told me, “just because he is frightened of how tall you actually stand.