I believed love meant patience, sacrifice, and forgiveness, even when it slowly erased parts of who I used to be.
Everything changed one Tuesday morning.
I was going through my grocery notebook and a few crumpled receipts when I found a lottery ticket I had bought the day before without thinking too much about it.
An elderly man had sold it to me at a corner store while I waited out a sudden rainstorm, and I bought it out of habit rather than hope.
While Mason played on the floor with his toy trucks, I opened the official lottery website and began reading the winning numbers out loud in a distracted voice.
Five, twelve, twenty three.
I glanced at my ticket, then back at the screen, feeling a strange tension building in my chest.
Thirty four, forty five, and the additional number was five.
I checked again slowly, my breathing turning uneven as the realization settled in.
My hands began shaking so badly that my phone slipped from my grip, and I sank down onto the kitchen floor with the ticket clutched tightly in my hand.
Fifty million dollars.