My stepfather was a construction worker for 25 years and raised me to earn my PhD. Then the professor froze when he saw him at the graduation ceremony…Just-in-time supplies I grew up in a home that was whole only on paper. My parents separated before I even learned how to write my name. My mother, Elena, brought me back to a quiet farming town in Maple Ridge, a rural community surrounded by endless cornfields and dusty roads. I barely remembered the face of my biological father. But I remembered