Us.
He took my face in both hands and said, “I will spend the rest of my life making this worth it.”
I believed him.
I withdrew before second year and started working. First at a dental office during the day, then at a pharmacy at night. Later, I picked up weekend shifts doing billing for an urgent care network.
I learned how to survive on bad sleep, cheap food, and the kind of hope that keeps moving because it can’t afford to stop.
Marcus and I got married at a courthouse the next year. We told each other we would have a real celebration after graduation.
We kept postponing joy and calling it discipline.
The years that followed looked ordinary from the outside.
They were not.
I paid rent, utilities, groceries, gas, exam fees, and whatever tuition his aid package did not cover.
Marcus had qualified for emergency need-based support after his family collapsed, but the paperwork had been filed when his life was in chaos.
Later, after we were married, my income helped keep him in school while an old family education fund was still tangled in his name.
On paper, it looked complicated.
In real life, it was survival.
Every exam he passed felt like ours.
Every rotation he survived felt like proof that I had not burned down my own future for nothing.
I told myself I would go back one day. I even kept my textbooks in storage for the first two years because getting rid of them felt too final.
Eventually, I packed them into a closet.