There is no one to tell you that you’re doing it right, or that it’s okay to be scared, or that you can put it down for an hour.

Every decision is final and every decision is yours: which bill to pay first when there isn’t enough for both, whether that cough is worth a doctor’s visit you can’t quite afford, whether to wake her in the night or let her sleep.

I made those calls a hundred times a week, alone, in the dark, guessing, terrified of getting one wrong.

And the strangest part, the part I have never told anyone, is that some nights I would finish the ledger and check the locks and sit in that chair by her bed, and a small, awful, secret voice in me would whisper that I could not do this, that I was going to fail her, that I was a child pretending to be a wall — and I would have to press that voice down and keep going anyway, because there was no one to press it down for me.