“It was a challenge, because she couldn’t be involved in teaching, she couldn’t be involved in Greentoes, she couldn’t be involved in her ordinary daily life,” Victor Thompson said.

Along with having to stop doing what she loved, Rossetti Thompson also had to decide what to do with her new business, so she turned to her husband.

“He had to make a decision,” she said. “I told him, ‘I’m not going to be able to rest and do Greentoes. You can do this. Do you want to do this?’”

For the first few minutes after she asked, Thompson said, his answer was that he couldn’t.

“I supported her idea of this business, but she was the one that put everything together,” he said. “All the concepts, all the people she had met, all the work that she’d done. That’s what I’m thinking right away: I don’t know anything about this.”

Thompson, who was working in home remodeling at the time, realized that the reasons he was saying no were why he had to say yes.

“I didn’t want her dream, all the energy and time she put into this vision, to die,” he said. “I looked at her and said, ‘I’ll take care of it,’ and from that moment, I took care of it.”

Challenging times