“Here’s $100—Can you be my mom today?” a billionaire boss’s son asked—until a shy woman replied, “Keep it. Billionaires pay in secrets.”

I sat on the edge of the bed and cried without making a sound.

Not because I was grateful, though part of me was. Not because I was frightened, though I was that too. I cried because money had fixed in one minute what love, work, pride, and prayer had failed to fix in a year, and the unfairness of that felt like a second kind of illness.continue reading …