Two pink lines.

Two pink lines was all it took to change the course of Alana Lee's life. At just 19 years old, the young college student already had enough on her plate with three exams to study for and a fifteen page essay due in less than 24 hours. The absolute last thing that she needed was to add a missed period to the list. Begrudgingly, she took the at-home pregnancy test anyway and convinced herself that waiting for the results would be nothing more than a minor inconvenience in her day. But when those two pink lines emerged, marking the end of everything that she had ever known, meeting all of those deadlines suddenly felt like they didn't matter. Nothing seemed to matter anymore as the realization hit that she was about to become a mom, a mother, a parent... and she was barely passing Poli-Sci.

Alana didn't even make it to the end of the semester before she abruptly dropped out of Boston University and abandoned all of her career goals. Raising a child on her own while earning a degree was a multi-tasking nightmare that she was nowhere near ready to face. Perhaps college would've remained on the table had her parents shown more support and offered her a helping hand. Instead, they never quite looked at her the same again. While they didn't officially disown her, they might as well have as she could feel them pushing her further away the larger her baby bump grew. As for the father, Alana wasn't interested in involving him. The less than thrilled reaction from her parents made her hesitant to tell her own friends, much less the guy who started it all. Between her parent's judgmental eyes that bore through her like laser beams, and the guilt that gnawed at her gut every time she passed by her former fling, she could no longer tolerate being in Boston. It was her hometown, where she was born and raised, but nothing about living through shame and disappointment felt like "home."

Realizing that nothing was holding her back in Boston, Alana moved to Wichita, Kansas for a fresh start. Soon after, she gave birth to a blonde-haired baby girl on September 22nd, 1991. Karen Lindsay Lee instantly became her mother's pride and joy. One look into her new daughter's bright eyes and she knew that every sacrifice was worth enduring. Being a single parent was difficult, but Alana was able to manage and raised Karen to become a lively child, full of energy and spirit, with a big heart and even bigger smile. Despite Alana's worries that she wasn't providing enough for her daughter, Karen was happy. The little girl didn't mind that they lived in a small one-bedroom apartment or that some years Santa forgot to place presents under their Christmas tree. Material possessions didn't hold much value for Karen. As long as she had her mother, she was perfectly content.

Unfortunately, the one thing that Karen's happiness depended on was the one thing that couldn't last. When she was eight years old, her mother passed away after losing her battle with cancer. To say that the death crushed her would be an understatement. Karen cried and screamed at the top of her lungs for almost an entire day before she exhausted herself and finally fell asleep on the social worker's couch. While she had known for quite some time that something was wrong with Alana's health, she was still too young to fully grasp the severity. She always expected that her mother would make a complete recovery. Even after the social worker carried her away from the hospital, even after she had spent several days living at the orphanage, Karen still firmly held onto the hope that her mother would return to her. For weeks, she waited to be taken back home while the other kids mercilessly teased her for having such unbelievable faith.

Months passed before Karen snapped out of her childish delusions to understand the concept of death and accept that her mother was never returning. But acceptance didn't make moving on any easier. She bounced from foster home to foster home, always ending up back at the orphanage, because she was deemed too problematic to keep around for an extended stay. In truth, Karen wasn't a bad kid. Certainly not nearly as much of a troublemaker as her caretakers would like to make her out to be. She just didn't want to be adopted. She didn't want another mom. If that meant having to break a few vases, steal a few dollars here and there, and "misplace" some very expensive jewelry, then she was willing to frustrate all her foster parents enough to not keep her around. Transferring back and forth between different homes and the orphanage was a tiresome cycle that continued for years until she reached that age where no one really wanted to adopt her anyway. Avoiding adoption was easy when you had a "rebellious teenager" reputation and there were much younger, cuter kids who needed homes. Ironically, though, it was at this age that Karen started to secretly want a loving family of her own.

Most people didn't look twice at Karen when they visited the orphanage, usually because she was fifteen and the oldest of the bunch, but that changed with Frank and Emma Daniels. The first time that she met the couple, they caught her sneaking a candy bar to one of the younger kids. Instead of getting into trouble like she was fully expecting, the Daniels surprisingly laughed it off and asked if she had another to share with them -- she did. What happened afterwards was a bit of a whirlwind. One day she was handing off a stolen piece of candy to two adults, and the next, they were moving her into their home as her new foster parents. Karen wasn't sure what made Frank and Emma want to take in a known candy thief, and a terrible one at that, but she couldn't have been more grateful for that extra Kit-Kat bar in her pocket.

Living with the Daniels was so unlike any of her other past experiences in the system. For the first time since her mother's death, Karen actually felt a strong, positive connection to a family. Her mother could never be replaced, but Emma was a pretty close second. She and Frank were loving and patient in a way that none of her previous foster parents had ever been. Even when Karen fell back into the bad habit of causing trouble just for the sake of being too scared to feel comfortable and vulnerable with a family, the Daniels still didn't give up on her. With Frank and Emma's help, she was able to work through the abandonment and anger issues that manifested from being orphaned at such young age. The process wasn't simple or easy by any means, but Karen finally had a support system that believed in her, and that carried her through her toughest days.

Focusing on her education was one of the ways that Karen tried to move forward. Frank, being a professor himself, gave her all of the at-home tutoring that she needed to catch up with her peers. By the time that she graduated high school, her grades had improved so much that she was accepted into several prestigious universities. But there was only one college that she had her heart set on -- Boston University. A part of her had always felt guilty that her mother never completed her degree due to the unplanned pregnancy. She thought that attending BU would finally finish what her mother started. When Alana was alive, she talked fondly of Boston and promised that she would take Karen back one day to see the city where she had grown up. That never happened, but Alana's wish did not die with her. It lived on in Karen, who never forgot about how her mother's face would light up whenever she talked about how much she missed walking along the city's harbor. The desire to reconnect with her mother in her hometown was too overwhelming to ignore. She wanted to be in Boston to feel closer to the woman who had given her the precious gift of life before hers was unfairly taken away.

Boston was full of surprises. For an 18-year-old girl who had never been outside the borders of Kansas, the move was a culture shock at first, but Karen quickly adapted to the atmosphere of the new city and the college life at Boston University. The biggest surprise of all, though, came on her 21st birthday when she learned that her mother had left a safety deposit box for her to open when she was of the designated age. Karen had been through many "life-changing" moments in her short 21 years of existence, but none of them compared to what she found inside that box. Scribbled down in her mother's handwriting was the name of her father and his last known location, right there in Boston. Granted, the address was over two decades old, but had she been living in the same city as her father this whole time? Had she unknowingly met him before? Bumped into him on the street? Said "excuse me" to him on the train? An endless stream of questions flooded her head, but she didn't want the answers to any of them. She had spent her whole life convincing herself that she didn't have a father. Even when she was old enough to know that wasn't biologically possible, she still preferred to believe that her mother had somehow miraculously conceived a child on her own.

In a dramatic act of defiance, Karen lit the card containing her father's identity on fire, thinking that'd be the very last of any "daddy issues." But something about that name continued to haunt her. Zachary Ellis. She couldn't erase it from her mind, no matter how hard she tried. When googling him and finding every piece of information she could online wasn't satisfying enough, she started waiting outside his office just to catch a glimpse of this man who was practically a stranger to her. Was it stalking? Maybe... but Karen liked to think of it as "research." If she was going to introduce herself, she had to make sure that he was actually a decent human being and not murdering people in his spare time. After a lengthy and extensive "investigation," Karen did eventually end up meeting her father. The whole situation was extremely awkward, to saw the least, but she managed to somehow last through the initial chaos of breaking such a mind-blowing secret. Two years later, tensions have eased, though not enough to where they're completely comfortable around each other. Still, Karen is attempting to make the complicated father-daughter relationship work. She knows it's what her mother would've wanted.

Despite all of her less than ordinary circumstances, Karen is still trying her best to cling onto whatever little semblance of "normal" that she has remaining. Currently, all she wants is to survive the intense workload of grad school, salvage some type of healthy relationship with her father, and have a laugh or two along the way. Karen isn't exactly sure where she is headed next, or what other crazy surprises await in the future, but after all the curveballs that life has thrown at her, she's certain that she can handle anything.

Well, almost anything.