Those words meant more than anything. They were the words I was desperate to hear from my own mother, but here, right now, coming from Lonnie, they were everything, everything my mother could never give me, and I was somehow finally okay with that. Maybe that was the first step to healing this crater in my chest. I’d spent my entire life with the belief that family was blood, and no matter what, you couldn’t break away, that friendships came and went, but nobody would be there for you like your own. But these people had shown me that family meant so much more.
