I was coloring at the café counter when the world ended. One minute Mom was humming as she kneaded dough, the next strangers were telling us we’d never see our parents again. At five years old, I didn’t understand death, but I understood the terror in Liam’s eyes as they took us to the orphanage.
That first week, Liam traded his dessert for a photo of our family someone had salvaged. He propped it by our shared bed like a sacred relic. “We’ll get it all back,” he’d whisper when the nightmares woke me. “The café, the house, everything.”
The system tried to pull us apart when we were placed in different foster homes, but Liam fought like a lion to keep us together. He’d show up at my new school with Emma in tow, checking my bruises and emptying his pockets of crumpled dollar bills. “For the café fund,” he’d say, like it was our secret rebellion.
We became experts at surviving – Liam working construction night shifts, Emma cleaning offices before school, me tutoring neighborhood kids the moment I turned fourteen. Our apartment was a shoebox with a leaky faucet, but it was ours. We papered the walls with café blueprints and recipes we remembered Mom making.
The day we walked into our reclaimed café as owners, Emma burst into tears at the threshold. Liam just ran his hand over the counter’s familiar grooves, his callouses catching on the wood. We worked eighteen-hour days those first months, falling asleep in flour-dusted heaps, too exhausted to dream.
Now when customers ask why our pastries taste so special, we just smile. They don’t know they’re eating decades of determination, or that the three of us still gather every Sunday in our childhood home – the final piece of our promise reclaimed. Liam still makes the same toast Dad used to, and we clink glasses over the table where our family began and never really ended.
