I would have had a new roof.
And I would have lost everything else.
People ask me sometimes how it all happened. How a little girl finding a ring at Walmart ended up changing everything.
I tell them it didn’t start at Walmart.
It started on a dark highway in the rain three years earlier. When two people saw a car burning in a ditch and pulled over. When everybody else drove past.
And it started even before that. With a nurse who said, Mom, I am the professional. Somebody has to stop. With a grandmother who said, When you find something, you give it back. With a seven-year-old in glued-together sneakers who held a diamond in her palm and asked the only question that mattered.
Do you think somebody’s crying because they lost it?
That’s the whole thing, really. That’s all of it.
Somebody’s always crying because they lost something.
