A year and a half after that Christmas, we moved out of our tiny, unsafe apartment into a two-story house in a quiet suburb outside Chicago. It had a backyard big enough for Hazel to run barefoot without me worrying about broken glass. It had a fireplace in the living room that Hazel insisted we use even when the weather wasn’t cold enough, because she liked the way it made everything feel like a story.
Hazel was seven then, thriving in second grade. Ivy left her sales job and started helping with our accounting. She was brilliant with numbers in a way she’d never had space to be when her commission checks controlled her life.
Every weekend we drove to Rockford to see Grandpa. He was eighty by then, still sharp, still stubborn, still proud. Hazel’s drawing still hung on his wall like a masterpiece. He pointed it out to visitors as if it were proof of something he could not put into words.
Uncle Silas became our unofficial adviser. He looked over big contracts, helped plan expansion, asked careful questions about sustainability. He never let me drift into arrogance. He reminded me constantly what money was for—security, not status.
I didn’t see my parents again for over a year.