The Kitchen Table at 2 A.M.

David Chen sat at his kitchen table in Roanoke, Virginia, at two in the morning, surrounded by overdue bills. The layoff notice from the furniture plant still lay folded in his shirt pocket. Three children slept upstairs. His wife, Sarah, had cried herself to sleep hours ago.

He picked up each envelope like a man counting wounds. Mortgage. Electric. The pediatrician bill from when Emma had pneumonia in October. He added the numbers on the back of a grocery receipt, and his stomach dropped.

Then his eyes fell on his grandmother's old Bible — the one with her handwriting crowding the margins. It had fallen open to Hebrews 13. He read the words slowly: "Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you."

He looked around the dim kitchen. The refrigerator hummed. The faucet dripped its familiar rhythm. Nothing had changed — the bills still covered the table, the layoff letter still sat in his pocket. But something shifted in his chest, like a door opening in a room he thought had no exits.