He had grown up on the east side of Riverview, Illinois, in a neighborhood where windows were patched with cardboard and children learned to step over broken glass before they learned to cross the street. His mother, Maribel, had scrubbed hospital floors at night and came home smelling of bleach and exhaustion, yet she always managed to hum lullabies while heating canned soup. She told him stories about having dreams, even if life seemed bent on stealing them.
When Maribel passed away suddenly, gone like a light switched off in the middle of a sentence, Jace was left alone with a grandmother who was too weak to care for herself. The system tried to place him, but Jace slipped through fingers like spilled water. He began collecting cans, sleeping in abandoned cars or under tarps when it rained, wandering the city like a ghost no one saw.
Yet one lesson from his mother clung to him like a heartbeat: right and wrong mattered, no matter who you were.