I checked into a cheap motel with paper-thin walls, the kind where you can hear the television from the room next door. I sat on the edge of the sagging mattress, staring at the blank screen of my phone. I didn’t know it then, but the silence between my son and me wasn’t just a pause. It was the beginning of a war. And the first shot had just been fired.

To understand the magnitude of that rejection, you have to understand the cost of the ticket that got me there.

My name is Amy Carter. I was born in Nashville, raised on apple pie and the gospel of hard work. I married Robert when I was twenty-two. He was a man of few words but vast kindness, the owner of a small hardware store. We lived a simple, golden life until the day he collapsed from a heart attack when Daniel was fifteen.

Robert left quietly, like a candle blown out in a drafty room. He left me with a teenage son, a failing store, and a mountain of debt.

I didn’t mourn the way rich widows do, with black veils and months of rest. I mourned with a mop in my hand. I sold the store to pay the creditors. I took a job cleaning dental offices at night, the smell of bleach becoming my perfume. In the afternoons, I worked as a receptionist. My hands, once soft from kneading dough, grew rough and cracked.

But I smiled. I smiled because of Daniel.

He was my sun. He was brilliant, driven, and kind. We did homework together at the kitchen table late into the night. When he got into the engineering program at the University of Chicago, we danced in our tiny kitchen.

“I’m going to build bridges, Mom,” he told me, his eyes shining. “And I’m going to name the biggest one after you.”

“Name it after your father,” I said, smoothing his hair.