I wasn’t snooping. I know how that sounds, but I wasn’t. I only wanted to grab Ben’s lunch container so I could wash it before hopping onto my next Zoom call. The lunchbox had been left in his backpack again, and I had maybe ten minutes before my next meeting. Ben’s backpack was always a mess—gum wrappers, crumpled worksheets, melted chocolate bars, and that one lonely sock I hadn’t seen a match for in two weeks. I didn’t expect to find anything unusual that morning. Ben was already twenty minutes

My name is Sarah Miller, and I’m forty years old. Looking back, I can see how my youth slipped away, little by little, lost in the ruins of love stories that never worked out. Some men betrayed me, breaking my heart into pieces I didn’t know how to pick up. Others treated me like a short stop on their way to somewhere better, like I was just a chapter in a story they weren’t ready to finish. Every time a relationship ended, I’d go home, feeling small and tired, and

THE CHRISTMAS EVE I STOPPED PRETENDING At 63 years old, I honestly believed I’d seen everything money could do to people. I’d seen it make strangers friendly, make friends greedy, and sometimes make good people slowly turn into something colder. But when my son fell in love, I learned something new:Money can ruin more than dreams—it can ruin people’s hearts. My name is Samuel, but everyone calls me Sam. And last Christmas, if you’d told me I’d be standing inside a jaw-dropping beach mansion wearing thrift-store clothes that smelled like