“You can’t do this for me.”
“I can,” I said. “And I’m not. I’m doing it for us.”
That was the sentence I built the next eight years on. Us.
He took my face in both hands and said, “I’m going to spend the rest of my life making this worth it.”
I believed him. I would like it on the record that any reasonable person would have.
We married at the county building the following year with two witnesses off the corridor. We said we would do a real one after graduation. We postponed joy for eight years and called it discipline, which is a thing I would now warn any young woman about at length.
I worked. Dental office days, pharmacy nights, and then weekend shifts doing revenue cycle work for an urgent care network, which is the job that ended up mattering.
I paid rent, utilities, groceries, gas, board exam fees, and the part of his tuition that his aid did not cover.
