Rachel Miller knew nothing of that house when she woke at five a.m., as she always did. At twenty-eight, she felt older—not from age, but from responsibility.

She was a single mother with two children, unpaid bills, and a grief that never healed: her mother Grace, gone too soon from cancer.

In their small apartment in Tampa, her son Ethan slept clutching a pillow, while Lily breathed softly, hair tangled across her face.

Rachel made coffee, warmed bread, folded uniforms, and her eyes drifted to a shelf holding her mother’s old recipe notebook—worn pages, flour-stained, filled with warmth. Grace always said the real ingredient wasn’t butter or sugar, but love.