Emma frowned. “Getting what back?”
He turned to us, eyes burning with determination.
“Mom and Dad’s café.”
Liam got his first job the second he turned sixteen. It wasn’t glamorous—stocking shelves at a grocery store, working late shifts at a gas station—but he never complained.
“It’s just the beginning,” he told us one night, collapsing onto the couch in Emma’s foster home, exhaustion clear in his face. “One day, we’ll have something of our own.”
At seventeen, Emma joined him. She worked as a waitress at a tiny diner, going home with aching feet and smelling like coffee.
“You should’ve seen this one customer,” she grumbled, tossing her apron onto the chair. “Kept snapping his fingers at me like I was some kind of pet.”
Liam smirked. “Did you spit in his drink?”
Emma threw a napkin at him. “No, but I thought about it.”
I watched them from the sidelines, still too young to help, feeling useless. But I never forgot our promise.
By the time we all turned eighteen, we had aged out of the system, officially on our own. Instead of going separate ways, we pooled our money and rented the smallest apartment we could find—just one bedroom, a tiny kitchen, and a couch that Liam insisted on sleeping on.
“We finally live together again,” Emma said, looking around our cramped space. “Like a real family.”
We worked like crazy. Liam took on two jobs, Emma picked up double shifts, and when I was old enough, I joined them. Every dollar we earned, we saved. We didn’t go out, we didn’t buy new clothes unless absolutely necessary.
One night, as we counted our savings on the kitchen table, Liam leaned back in his chair, arms crossed.
“We’re close,” he said, a grin playing on his lips. “Closer than we’ve ever been.”
Emma raised an eyebrow. “Close to what?”
He looked at both of us, his eyes burning with the same fire they always had.
“To getting the café back.”
The day we signed the papers for the café, I swear I could feel Mom and Dad with us.
Liam ran his fingers over the worn wooden counter, his expression unreadable. Emma stood beside me, clutching my hand so tight it almost hurt.
“This is it,” she whispered.
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