to me and Kora.
But Patricia had lost a child too.
There are people you trust because they survived the same fire.
She read the pages over two weeks.
Then she told me plainly that they were a book.
A real one.
One that deserved to exist.
She knew an editor at a small press who might want to see it.
I want to be clear about what happened next because people like stories where one editor reads a manuscript and suddenly everything changes.
That is not what happened.
The
