You always believed that love, if given enough patience, could build a whole world out of almost nothing.
That belief was the reason you adopted Lucía when she was only two weeks old. It was the reason you ignored the people who said a woman on her own would drown in the work, the cost, the exhaustion, the thousand invisible sacrifices that come with raising a child. It was the reason you painted her nursery yourself, assembled the crib with one blistered hand and one borrowed screwdriver, and learned how to warm bottles at three in the morning with your eyes half-closed and your heart fully open.
You were never afraid of doing it alone.
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Loneliness, you had learned early, was not always the absence of people. Sometimes it was the presence of people who never knew how to hold your pain without making it heavier. So when you chose motherhood, you chose it with both eyes open. No husband. No live-in partner. No secret co-parent hiding offstage. Just you, your salary from the public library, a modest little house on Maple Street, and a baby girl you loved so fiercely it felt less like emotion and more like architecture.
By the time Lucía turned six, your life had found its rhythm.
Not an easy rhythm, exactly. More like a determined one. Mornings were cereal, mismatched socks, lost crayons, and hair that refused to stay braided. Evenings were dinner at the little kitchen table, baths with too many toys, picture books in bed, and your private ritual of standing in her doorway one extra minute after she fell asleep, just to make sure the world was still being kind to her.
