What they couldn’t know yet was how hard the system would fight to keep them apart. How a concerned teacher’s phone call would bring Child Protective Services to their door. How courtrooms, social workers, home studies, and medical reports would test whether a promise made in one desperate moment could survive the real world.
But that afternoon, sitting on a sagging couch between a dying grandmother and a lonely millionaire, Lila Carter felt something she hadn’t felt in years.
She felt like maybe—just maybe—she was allowed to hope.
