Growing up in foster care taught me one rule: nothing lasts. By eight, I could pack my life into a trash bag in minutes and expect everyone to leave eventually.
Then I met Noah.
He was nine, in a wheelchair, and mostly ignored by the other kids. I sat beside him one afternoon and treated him like a person, not a problem. From that moment on, we were inseparable. No one adopted us. So we chose each other.
At eighteen, we aged out of the system with bus passes and plastic bags. We built a life from nothing—tiny apartment, secondhand furniture, exhausting jobs. Friendship slowly became love. He proposed in our cramped kitchen. We married in a small ceremony filled with the few people who truly saw us.
The morning after our wedding, a suited stranger named Thomas knocked on our door.
He was an attorney. He’d been searching for Noah on behalf of a man named Harold Peters.
Years earlier, Harold had fallen outside a grocery store. Dozens of people walked past—except a boy in a wheelchair who stopped to help him and stayed until he was steady. Noah didn’t even remember it. Harold never forgot.
Harold had recently passed away. In his will, he left everything to Noah.
Not just money—but his house. A single-story home with a ramp already built and a yard anchored by an old tree.
For two kids who grew up believing nothing was permanent, standing inside a house that couldn’t be taken away felt unreal.
All our lives, no one chose us.
But one man did.
And because of a small act of kindness Noah barely remembered, we finally had what we’d never dared to expect:
A home.