I didn’t buy this house because I’m rich. I bought it because I ran out of ways to say thank you. For years, all I could afford were candles. She deserved exotic vacations and luxury cars, but I gave what I had—candles. Eventually, I even learned to make them myself, hoping that effort could somehow fill the gap of the lacking lavish air of it all. She never made me feel small for it. She always smiled—an honest attempt to convince me it was enough. A three-time cancer survivor, a single mother—and yet she lit every candle like it was a trophy. Held every melt like it had been flown in from Paris. But I knew. I knew it wasn’t what she deserved. How do you repay someone who spent years fighting just to have more time with you? When I was a child, she cut off her hair and bought new clothes, so I wouldn’t see the battle she was fighting. As a teen, she smiled brighter and cleaned constantly—doing more so I wouldn’t worry about the war she was waging. And when I became an adult, she hid it entirely.…