I grew up in an orphanage, the kind where you learn early that nothing is permanent—rooms change, caretakers change, friends get adopted, and you learn to hold people lightly because everyone leaves eventually. But somehow, one person never left: Lila. We weren’t just friends; we were two kids clinging to each other in a place that felt temporary by design. We slept in the same row of metal-framed beds, whispered secrets under blankets after lights-out, and promised that when we finally aged out, we’d build the kind of family neither of us got to grow up with.
We aged out at eighteen. Lila got a job at a call center; I worked the overnight shift at a diner. We split the rent on a tiny studio apartment with secondhand furniture and walls so thin you could hear the neighbors sneeze. It wasn’t much, but it was ours. For the first time, no one could tell us where to go or who could stay.
Three years later, everything changed. Lila came home from a party at two in the morning, pale and shaking. “I’m pregnant,” she said, standing in the doorway like she’d been struck. The father, Jake—her boyfriend of four months—blocked her number the next day. She had no parents, no siblings, nobody else. Just me. So I went with her to every appointment, every ultrasound, every late-night meltdown. And when baby Miranda was born, pink and furious and perfect, I stood beside her in the delivery room holding her hand.
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