She was the whole reason there was anything worth paying for.

Chapter 6 — The Hardest Ten Years

The decade that followed was the hardest of my life, and I say that as someone whose life had not, up to that point, been easy.

I worked two jobs, sometimes three.

I enrolled in community college and took my classes at night and on weekends, studying at the kitchen table long after Grace was asleep, my eyes burning, coffee gone cold at my elbow, forcing the material into my exhausted head one page at a time.

I slept when exhaustion finally knocked me down and not a moment before.