Family is a key element in all of the stories in the Mosaic Collections, and I know there are a lot of readers who didn’t grow up in traditional mom/dad + 2.5 kid families. Divorce, death, and foster care are part of many of our stories, and I wanted to write a story that held elements of those situations. I also wanted to tell a story about a foster family who made a difference.

So many times, television paints foster parents in a bad light. But there are millions out there opening up their homes to children in need. One of my best friends, Sandra, has been a foster parent for nearly thirty years. She has “specialized” in traumatized young women, with more than 25 coming to live with her and her husband. In addition to her foster daughters, she had her own children, including a set of twins and a wheelchair bound daughter who’d been brain-injured at birth. 

The foster daughters that came into Sandra’s home were able to see the unconditional love of a mother as they watched my friend care for her severely disabled daughter, who was unable to smile, laugh, or speak. These young women saw, firsthand,  the ferocious love a mother has, and they came to realize Sandra was just as committed to them. 

My friend tells her girls that they can’t do anything to make her stop loving them. By the time they leave their house, they believe it. As adults, most have remained connected to her. She has more grandchildren than she can count and she’s barely fifty!

But the trauma these young women have dealt with often still plagues them. They have a close family relationship with Sandra, her husband, and their children, but the urge to have that with their biological family is unbelievable. But what if that isn’t possible? What if that is detrimental or even dangerous? And what defines who our family is?

Those are the issues into which I wanted to delve with this book. I wanted to tell the adult foster child’s story and the unrelenting love of a foster mother who truly cared.