There was one more thing Leah handled for me.
The trucking company.
The driver who fell asleep worked for a freight company out of Greensboro. The state trooper’s report said he’d been on the road for nineteen hours, well over the federal limit for commercial drivers. He’d falsified his logbook.
Leah brought in a personal injury attorney she trusted, a soft-spoken man named Gerald Pike, who’d been handling truck accident cases in Charlotte for thirty years.
“Mrs. Hale,” Gerald said, sitting by my bed with a yellow legal pad. “I’ve read the trooper’s report. This isn’t going to be a long fight. They know what they did.”
It wasn’t a long fight.
Six months later, the trucking company’s insurance carrier settled. My hospital bills. My physical therapy. My lost wages for the four months I couldn’t go back to work. Lily’s care with Rosa. My totaled Honda.
And something extra, Gerald said, “for the hours you spent wondering if you’d ever see your daughter grow up.”
I won’t say the exact number. But it was enough to pay off my townhouse. And enough to open a college savings account for Lily with more money in it than I’d ever imagined I’d have.
I opened the 529 account at a Wells Fargo branch on Park Road, the same bank where I’d set up my mother’s monthly transfer nine years earlier.
The banker was a young woman named Kendra. When I told her I wanted to put in a hundred thousand dollars, she looked at me over her computer screen.
“That’s a really special gift,” she said. “Your daughter’s lucky.”
“No,” I said. “I’m the lucky one. I almost didn’t get to give it to her.”
Three weeks after the accident, I was finally discharged and went home.
My townhouse in Dilworth was quieter than I remembered. But it didn’t feel lonely anymore. It felt safe.
Rosa stayed with us for six more weeks, helping me get into a routine with Lily while I learned to get around on crutches. When the agency contract ran out, I paid Rosa directly to keep coming three mornings a week. She taught me how to bathe Lily one-handed. She taught me the Puerto Rican lullaby her grandmother used to sing to her.
For the first time in my adult life, every single dollar I earned stayed under my own roof.
It’s a strange feeling. I didn’t know what to do with it at first.
The first month, I bought Lily a crib mobile with little felt clouds, $64, and then sat on the nursery floor and cried, because I’d never once bought anything for myself or my child without first doing math about whether my mother might need it more.
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