“You can be heartbroken and paralyzed later,” she told me that first evening, taking a stack of unpaid bills from my trembling hands.

“Right now, your son needs dinner, and you need to figure out how to fight back.”

Our apartment sat above a small, noisy bakery and a dental office.

The single-pane windows rattled whenever heavy delivery trucks rolled past, the radiator hissed and clanked but rarely gave any actual warmth, and the kitchen was barely wide enough to open the oven door. Still, we made it a sanctuary.

I took a breakfast shift at a diner, coming home smelling of grease and coffee, and landed a good evening contract cleaning the executive suites at Oakridge Management, a prestigious downtown firm.

I was exhausted, but the Oakridge job covered rent and the groceries Grant kept failing to subsidize.