Grant, the ringleader, actually reached out afterward.
Not to network — Daniel braced for that — but to ask if his company's platform could be brought to his own kids' school, because his oldest was starting to struggle, and he was terrified his son would become either the bully or the bullied, and he didn't know how to stop it.
Daniel helped him.
Of course he did.
"That's the whole point, Mom," he told me. "If a kid like me builds a thing that helps a kid like Grant's kid, then none of it was for nothing. Not even the bad years. Especially not the bad years."
My son is thirty-one now.
He still runs the company. It's bigger every year. He could live anywhere; he keeps a place near me in Cedar Hollow, in the town where he was miserable, because he says the town didn't hurt him — a handful of scared kids did — and he's not going to let them take his home too.
