Airplanes are where people ignore each other, not where lives collide. But halfway through my flight, a toddler climbed into my lap—and no one came for him.
At first, I thought he’d wandered from a nearby seat. But when I scanned the rows, all I got were blank stares. The flight attendant cooed at him but didn’t stop. The man beside me shrugged. And the boy? He buried his face in my sweater like I was home.
By landing, my arms ached from holding him. “Where are his parents?” I asked the woman across the aisle. Her reply chilled me: “I thought you were together.”
What followed was a blur of security checks and hushed conversations. Jacob, they told me. No family found. No records. Just a child who’d latched onto a stranger and refused to let go.
I couldn’t leave him. Not when he cried for me in the social worker’s office. Not when he whispered nightmares in the temporary foster bed I’d set up in my apartment.
Then came the question that shattered and rebuilt me all at once: “Are you my forever now?”
Some stories begin with loss. Ours began with an empty aisle seat—and a love that filled it.
