For years, Chloe carried a weight no young person should carry, the awareness that her education, her future, her very stability, rested on my ability to keep going, shift after shift, that if I faltered she fell.

She never complained.

She worked her own jobs, kept her own grades up, tried to need as little as possible, and I watched the strain of it age her before her time, put those dark circles under her eyes, teach her to flinch at the cost of textbooks.

What the money gave her, more than tuition or rent, was the return of her own youth, permission to simply be twenty and hopeful and unburdened, to worry about ideas instead of survival.

Watching her walk off to her constitutional law seminar with a light step and a clear face, indistinguishable from the luckiest kids on that campus, healed something in me that all the hard years had bruised.