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.
