Chapter 7
I was promoted to managing partner the year Henry turned four.
More money.
More responsibility.
But I made a promise to myself and to Emma.
I would never be the husband who left before the kids woke up and came home after they slept.
I worked from home three days a week.
Coached Henry’s T-ball team.
Went to every art show Emma had.
Ate dinner at the kitchen table with my family every single night.
No exceptions.
No board meetings were more important.
No deal was worth missing bedtime stories.
I’d learned my lesson the hardest way possible.
Work was work.
Family was everything.
And if I wasn’t there to protect them, nothing else mattered.
Emma’s art career exploded.
She painted every morning before Henry woke up.
Big, bright, emotional canvases full of color and light and hope.
Galleries in New York and LA started calling.
Her paintings sold for tens of thousands of dollars.
She donated half every cent she made to the foundation.
The other half she put into a college fund for Henry.
And for the little girl we adopted when he was five.
Lila Mae.
Two years old.
Her mother had been one of the first women we’d helped at the foundation.
Had gotten clean.
Gotten a job.
Gotten her life together.
Then she’d been hit by a drunk driver on her way home from work one night.
No other family.
No one else to take Lila.
Emma and I looked at each other across the social worker’s desk.
And we both knew.
She was ours.
She had curly red hair and a gap between her two front teeth and a laugh that could fill a whole house.
Henry adored her.
Called her “my Lila” from the first second he saw her.
Protected her from everything.
Even the vacuum cleaner.
We were four now.
Perfect.
May you like
Whole.
Everything I’d ever dreamed of and more.
