without becoming cruel.
I had protected people who might never know my name.
Noah thought about that for a moment.
“Grandma Cole said you didn’t know your place,” he said.
I looked at my children in the rearview mirror—the three lives Garrett had treated as burdens, the three reasons I had learned that endurance could become power.
“She was right about one thing,” I said.
“I didn’t know it then.”
“Do you know now?” Liam asked.
I smiled.
“Yes.”
My place was not in the back row of someone else’s performance.
It was wherever my children could see me standing.
