And then, on Nov. 5, we received the eviction notice. Seven weeks later we were shivering in that stairwell, wondering where to turn.

I dialed the number of someone I normally would never call in the middle of the night — my father. The moment he answered, I dissolved into tears. He said he would help pay for a night or two in a hotel — that was all he could manage — and off we went.

The next morning, I awoke to the sickening realization that Kristil and I had no place to live, no idea where we were going to go and no one to help us. Kristil didn’t say much, but I knew she was scared.

“It’ll be O.K., Mom,” she said. “We’ll figure something out.”

But it was my responsibility to figure things out, not my child’s. She already had done all she could to change her life, finding hope and determination in our misfortune. As she wrote in her application essay: “Watching my mother struggle and wait for my father to get out only so he could slip right back in was painful, but it was also inspiring — inspiring in the sense that it gave me a reason to strive for a better life, a reason to keep trying and a reason to care.”

I just needed to help her across the finish line.

That winter, as Kristil readied and sent off her dozens of applications, devoting herself to each one, we bounced from cheap hotels to my father’s house (hours away) to a brief rental before ultimately finding ourselves in my aunt’s basement.

One evening that spring we were looking at books in Barnes & Noble when Kristil said, “So I got this email. It says they want to meet me to do an interview for college.”