Their first child was also unplanned, but she had been nineteen back then. Nineteen. She thought she was in love and that everything was going to work out fine. Work out fine in spite of the rocky beginning they had had. Not a chance. But she had believed. She believed that people could live “happily ever after.” She had to believe it because that’s exactly what he promised when he convinced her to run away with him the night of the party. “No strings to people who don’t give a crap.” She thought they would conquer the world. He had $5,000 in cash. Back then, it seemed like a lot of money. How naïve she had been.

The initial shock came when they realized that a month’s rent and security deposit took a chunk out of his loot. Tori had wasted no time looking for a job. She scoured the papers every day. Google was barely up and running at the time, and websites like Indeed and ZipRecruiter hadn’t been created yet. She finally landed a job as a hostess in a local restaurant. Her experience? Busing tables at the local pancake shop. With her pretty, youthful looks, it was enough for the proprietor to hire her. The pay wasn’t great, but she treated it as an opportunity to hone her organizational skills, anticipating that she would eventually get a better job. The restaurant business was not where she wanted to spend her career, such as it was.

He, on the other hand, took a little longer to find something he thought was “suitable,” but after another three months went by, he knew he had to do something. It was embarrassing to have your wife be the breadwinner, so he took a job at a local distribution center working in a warehouse. After a few months, he was done with forklifts and applied to the police academy. Decent pay, benefits, good retirement plan. Tori couldn’t really argue with that. But being married to a cop? She had heard hair-raising stories, and a lot of it wasn’t work related. But it was something.

Within the year, she got pregnant. They hadn’t planned on it, but there it was. She worked up until a few days before she delivered a baby boy. And voila! They were a family.