We were supposed to celebrate our younger son’s first birthday in our backyard on January 11th, 2025. Instead, four days before his party, we watched the Palisades fire take our home. We’d packed what we could, put our kids in the car and drove to Tennessee to live with family because we had nowhere else to go. Our house is gone. Our older son’s preschool is gone. The library, the restaurants, the small routines that made up a life are all gone.