If I could just keep the numbers straight, some animal part of me believed, then the rest of it could not fall apart.

And through all of it I was still a senior in high school, still trying to hold the grades that held my college scholarship, because losing that scholarship would have meant losing the one piece of the future my parents had planned for me that I could still reach.

So I studied.

I studied until one and two in the morning, at that same desk, after the bills were done.

And then — this was the part I told no one — I would go and sit for a while in the chair beside Evelyn’s bed, in the dark, and watch the blanket rise and fall, rise and fall, just to be sure.