She only reached over with one cold, weathered hand and closed it around mine, and she held it, and after a while she said, in a voice so quiet I had to lean in to catch it:

“That’s exactly why, honey.

That’s why God is going to look at you differently.”

I did not know what to make of it.

I still, to this day, cannot fully explain why that one sentence lodged itself in me the way it did and would not come loose.

It was not an answer to anything I had said.

It did not fix my exhaustion or send my husband home or make my son well.

And yet something in the way she said it — with a certainty that seemed to come from somewhere far past that dark little room — settled over me like a hand on the back of the neck, and I stopped crying, and I stayed.