“You can,” she said, the same way I’d said it on the sidewalk. “You will. Because I want to tie the knot where the thread began.” She sat back and exhaled like she’d been holding her breath for two weeks. “You bought me shoes. It sounds so small when you say it that way, but it was the first thing I’d been given in years without a ledger attached. I realized later that I left my old life wearing kindness. No one had ever dressed me in that before.”

“What if I… waste it?” I asked, because scarcity rewires your brain in permanent ways.

“You won’t,” she said simply. “You’ll make it multiply.”

I didn’t cash it that day. I propped it against the sugar canister, where it looked indecent, and I walked by it a dozen times like a cat pretending not to be interested. I slept badly, which is how I sleep when joy scares me. In the morning, I made eggs and told Tyler over FaceTime that if I bought an espresso machine I would become unbearable. “You’re already unbearable, Mom,” he said, fond. Jacob sent a meme about checks that would have made my grandmother clutch her pearls and also laugh until she wheezed.

I took the check to the bank, and the teller said “Good morning!” like she meant it and then glanced at the amount and said, “Oh! Very good morning.” I laughed. When the money lived inside numbers in my online account instead of on paper, it lost some of its dream glow and gained weight. I had work to do.

Savannah’s Closet started as a list on a notepad I stuck to the fridge with a magnet shaped like a lemon. Shoes. Socks. Coats. Diapers. Bus passes. Notes. The notes mattered. “Someone thinks you’re worth it” is what went on the first draft, and it stayed. We partnered with the shelter downtown and the women’s clinic and Dr. Martinez, who took one look at the flyer I handed him and said, “Put me down for a thousand. And banana bread.”