Sanctuary

Evelyn's POV

Four months had passed since Riley’s graduation, and I still hadn’t stopped watching her like she was a miracle.

Because she was.

Not the kind that floated down from the sky with a halo and harp music.
The kind you build.
The kind you fight for.
The kind that survives and *still* chooses softness.

She was no longer the frightened girl I’d met in a tutoring center with bruises on her wrists and silence in her eyes.

Now—she was unstoppable.

---

She moved through the apartment with this slow, confident grace that made everything around her pause. Her hair was longer, her clothes looser, softer, freer. Her laugh came quicker. Her eyes didn’t dart toward the door anymore when she spoke.

She was making plans now.

Dreaming out loud.

There was always paint on her fingers. A streak of charcoal on her cheek. Her sketchbooks were stacked on the table next to proposals for gallery spaces and scribbled price lists.

“I think I want to sell it,” she told me one night, flipping through her work. “The art. I want to make people feel things. Maybe… open a gallery someday?”

I blinked at her, stunned by how boldly she’d said it.

“You should,” I said, without hesitation. “You absolutely should.”

“You think I could actually do it?”

I cupped her jaw gently. “You survived hell and still found beauty. You don’t just deserve to do it, Riley. The world needs you to.”

She beamed.

And I swear the sun came second.

---

She’d taken a job at a community art center part-time, teaching drawing classes to kids once a week. On Tuesdays, she came home smelling like glue and markers, covered in glitter, full of stories about toddlers trying to draw dragons with six heads.

Luca sat beside her every night while she sketched, watching in fascination.

And somewhere in the space between those soft evenings and the long mornings we spent tangled in each other, something changed.

He started calling her Mama.

Not Ri-Ri.

Not Riley.

Mama.

It happened once, quietly, in the kitchen when she poured him cereal.

“Mama, can I have the blue bowl?”

She froze.

So did I.

And then she knelt, looked him in the eyes, and whispered, “You really mean that?”

He nodded.

“I love you,” he said, like it was the easiest truth in the world.

She cried in my arms for an hour that night.

Not from pain.

From belonging.

---

There was pride in her now.

Not in a loud, defiant way. But a steady kind.

She didn’t flinch when strangers stared.
She didn’t apologize when she talked about being intersex.
She corrected people gently, confidently.