Nearly a decade earlier he had left Phoenix for San Antonio with almost nothing, and over those years he had built something real: a small chain of senior living residences, the kind of places where somebody’s grandmother could grow old with her dignity intact.
It had consumed him.
He worked the way people work when they’re trying to outrun the fear of failing the people they love — twelve, fourteen hours a day, his phone perpetually dying in a drawer while he sat with families making the hardest decisions of their lives.
He told himself the sacrifice was for his parents.
He told himself the long silence was temporary.
And every single month, without fail, he sent money home.