Part One: Two Thousand a Month
I married Ezra for two thousand dollars a month while he sat behind bars serving out a twelve-year sentence, and I told myself the whole arrangement was about pure survival, nothing close to love. Twenty-seven years old, raising my younger brother Caleb alone, and that particular morning our landlord had taped a final eviction notice square across our apartment door.
Three years later, Ezra finally walked free, set a black lacquered box down on my kitchen table, and revealed exactly why his own mother had chosen me in the first place. That was the moment I finally understood something important — poverty had never once made me invisible to people like her. It had simply made me useful.
Caleb spotted that rent notice before I managed to hide it away from him. Seventeen, already too tall for his worn-out sneakers, too stubborn by half to ever ask why I kept stretching the same pot of soup across three separate dinners.
