Love Shows Up

Two stories. One system. A choice between looking away and showing up.

In a broken foster care system where children are processed like paperwork and youth age out with nothing but a bus pass and a list of shelters, two narratives unfold—one of devastating loss, one of radical hope.

THE SYSTEM STORY

Keisha is a young mother fighting to get clean and get her daughter back. Brittany is a six-year-old entering foster care, where she will be abused, disbelieved, and bounced from placement to placement before aging out into homelessness. Alice is fourteen when she runs from a group home and falls into the hands of a trafficker. Jose, Maria, Bonita, Manuel, and Gino are American children separated from their immigrant parents and lost between systems—one of them will die because no one can consent to her medical treatment.

These are not worst-case scenarios. They are the system made flesh.

THE VILLAGE STORY

Lynne is a graduate student who sees a young woman counting change for a cup of coffee, carrying a garbage bag full of belongings. She buys the coffee. Then she decides to build something more: a village of tiny homes for youth who age out of foster care—a place with doors that lock, heat that works, a garden, a kitchen, a fire pit, and people who refuse to leave.

Told in alternating chapters that weave together pain and possibility, Love Shows Up is a novel about what breaks us and what saves us. It is about the children the system forgets and the community that refuses to let them disappear. It is about a cup of coffee that becomes a movement. It is about showing up. It is about staying.