Sometimes from standing in a grocery store parking lot with flowers you did not get to buy and deciding, without yet knowing how, that this will not be how your story ends.

Desmond thought freezing my cards would make me small.

Instead, it reminded me exactly how large a life Warren and I had built, and exactly how fiercely I was still capable of defending it.

The cards failed that day.

I did not.

And in the final accounting, that made all the difference.

THE END