Chapter 1 — The Estimate

My son Caleb was eight years old when the doctors told me he needed a surgery I could never in my life afford.

I had raised him alone since the day he was born.

His father had left when I was six months pregnant, told me he was not ready to be a family, packed a single suitcase, and disappeared before I had even bought the crib.

I will not spend many words on that man, because he spent very few of his on us, and a person who walks away from a child before that child has drawn a breath has told you everything about himself that you need to know.

Everyone around me had an opinion in those months.

Give the baby up, they said, gently and not so gently.

You are too young, too poor, too alone.

I listened to all of it, and I did not do it.

I kept my son.

I have never once regretted the keeping, though it cost me nearly everything I had, and for a while it looked as though it might cost me the one thing I could not bear to lose.

People who tell a frightened young woman to give up her child mean well, most of them; they are trying to save her from a hardness they can see coming.

But there is a kind of arithmetic they cannot do from the outside, the arithmetic of what a child is worth to the mother who wants him, which does not fit on any of the sensible ledgers the world keeps.

I could not have explained it then.

I only knew, with a certainty that frightened even me, that whatever it cost, I was going to keep my son, and I was going to find a way, and if there was no way then I would make one.

I did not yet know that making one would require me to marry a dying stranger.

But I think, even then, some part of me understood that there was no length I would not go to, and that this was not weakness in me but the one unshakeable strength I had.

I worked every shift a body could stand.