I broke. I collapsed against her, sobbing with a ferocity that scared me. But these weren’t tears of grief; they were tears of profound, overwhelming relief. Rachel wrapped her arms tightly around my thin, frail body and held me. “You’re safe now. I’m not going anywhere.”
The next two years were a crucible. Chemotherapy is a barbaric science. It burns you from the inside out, poisoning the body in the hopes that the cancer dies before you do. But Rachel was my shield. She drove me to every single outpatient infusion. She sat beside me, her hand gripping mine, as the toxic fluids dripped into my veins. She learned to cook bland, easily digestible meals. When I felt hideous, hiding my bald head under a beanie, she would look at me and say, “Good morning, beautiful girl. It’s a gift to see your face.”
Insurance covered the bulk of the medical costs, but the secondary expenses were astronomical. Co-pays, specialized anti-nausea medications, organic foods. Rachel’s house was modest, and her nurse’s salary only stretched so far. I found out years later that she had quietly taken out a second mortgage on her home just to ensure I never felt the financial strain.
Six months into my treatment, Rachel sat me down at the kitchen table. Pancake the cat was purring on the rug. Rachel looked uncharacteristically nervous.
“Sarah, I need to ask you something important.”
A cold spike of panic hit me. She’s tired of this, I thought. I’m too expensive. She’s sending me back.
“I want to legally adopt you,” Rachel blurted out, tears already welling in her eyes. “Not just foster. I want you to be my daughter. My real, permanent daughter. Would that be okay?”
I couldn’t even speak. I just threw my arms around her neck and buried my face in her shoulder. The adoption went through on my fourteenth birthday. I officially became Sarah Torres. She gave me a silver necklace with our initials intertwined. “You’re mine now,” she promised. “Forever.”
By the time I was fifteen, I had entered the maintenance phase. The chemo was less frequent, my hair was growing back in thick dark curls, and I finally had energy again. But I was two years behind in school.
“You are brilliant, Sarah,” Rachel told me one evening, dropping a massive stack of textbooks onto the dining table. “Your biological parents told you that you were average. That you had no potential. I am going to make sure we prove them so unbelievably wrong that it haunts them.”
She enrolled me in an aggressive, advanced online curriculum. She hired a math tutor with money she didn’t have. She stayed up until midnight, exhausted after twelve-hour hospital shifts, reading over my English essays and quizzing me on biology. We became a machine. My anger at my biological parents transformed into a laser-focused ambition. I wanted to be a doctor. I wanted to be Dr. Patterson. I wanted to be Rachel.
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