“You won it, you carry it.

I only hold on to what’s mine.”

I stood thirty feet away with my back to the cold stone to keep my knees from buckling.

Seen without the barrier of a screen, the reality of them hit me like a train.

They were magnificent — none of the soft, pampered fragility of the children in my world, but something forged, radiating the quiet power of oak trees that have lived through hard winters.

And the love I had spent a decade suffocating under acquisitions detonated in my chest, a tearing physical pain.