I adopted my best friend's daughter after her tragic death. I dedicated all my love and time to her for 13 years. I sacrificed everything to make sure she felt loved, chosen, and safe. But the girl I loved more than my own life did something on her 18th birthday that made me cry like I've never cried before.
My name is Anna, and I grew up in an orphanage. I slept in a room with seven other girls. Some were adopted. Others reached the maximum age. But we stayed—my best friend, Lila, and me.
We weren't friends because we chose each other, but because we had survived together. We promised each other that one day we would have the kind of family we had only seen in movies.
We both turned 18. Lila got a job at a call center. I started working as a waitress at an all-night restaurant. We shared an apartment with mismatched furniture bought at flea markets and a bathroom so small you had to sit sideways on the toilet. But it was the only place where no one could tell us what to do.
Three years later, Lila arrived home from a party looking like she had seen a ghost.
“I’m pregnant,” she announced, standing in our doorway at two in the morning. “And Jake isn’t answering my calls.”
Jake, the guy she'd been dating for four months, blocked her number the next day. She had no family to call. No parents to lean on. She only had me.
I held her hand at every doctor's appointment, every ultrasound, and every 3 a.m. panic attack. I was there in the delivery room when little Miranda was born, watching Lila go from a terrified girl to an exhausted mother in eight hours.
“She’s perfect,” Lila whispered, holding the screaming baby against her chest. “Look at her, Anna. She’s beautiful.”
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