When I was just five years old, everything I knew vanished overnight.
One moment, our little café was filled with the comforting hum of espresso machines and the sound of our parents laughing in the kitchen. The next, silence. Emptiness. A single knock on the door changed our lives forever.
Both of our parents were gone—taken by a tragic accident. No warnings. No final hugs. Just strangers telling us we were now orphans.
I didn’t understand. I remember clutching my sister Emma, who was seven, as tears streamed down her cheeks. My brother Liam, only nine, stood frozen—too stunned to cry, too young to process the weight now on his shoulders.
We were taken to an orphanage, where unfamiliar walls replaced the warmth of our home. I kept asking, “When are Mom and Dad coming back?” But no one had an answer.
Within weeks, our world was erased. The café—sold. Our home—gone. Even our parents’ belongings disappeared, liquidated to cover debts we hadn’t known existed. It felt like the universe was trying to erase them, and us, too.
But in those darkest nights, crammed in a shared room full of crying children and distant dreams, Liam whispered something that anchored us:
“We’re all we have now. I’ll take care of you. I promise.”
And that’s when we made a pact—a quiet, unbreakable promise between three grieving children:
We would survive. We would protect each other. And one day, we would fulfill the dream our parents died before completing.
It would take years of sacrifice, relentless determination, and pain we didn’t yet understand. But from the ashes of our loss, that promise became our purpose.
