She gets dramatic. She was eight years old. She had awakened alone in the dark and called her grandfather at two in the morning because the very people who were biologically and morally obligated to choose her had explicitly chosen not to. And the only word the man who adopted her could reach for was dramatic.
I picked up my pen. I pressed the tip into the legal pad so hard the paper nearly tore. I wrote three words, underlining each one twice.
Pattern. Documentation. Court. Skyla woke up around 3:30 in the afternoon. She padded into the kitchen, her wild hair static-charged and sticking up in every direction, her sloth pajamas deeply rumpled. Standing there in the doorway, she looked simultaneously like a tiny, fragile seven-year-old and a weary woman of forty. It is a specific, heartbreaking phenomenon I have witnessed in courtrooms more times than I care to count: children who have been forced to survive hard things develop ancient eyes in young, soft faces.
“You stayed,” she whispered. Her tone was completely flat, as if she had spent her entire nap fully expecting to wake up and find my rental car gone from the driveway.
“I told you I would,” I said gently, turning my chair to face her.
She climbed into the seat beside me and pulled her knees tight against her chest, making herself as small as physically possible. “Did Daddy call?”
“He did.”
“Is he mad at me?”
The absolute audacity of the question broke something deep inside my chest. Is he mad? “No, sweetheart,” I said, forcing my voice to remain soft and entirely steady. “He is not mad. How are you feeling? Are you hungry?”
She looked down at her bare toes. Her voice dropped to a mortified whisper. “I’m embarrassed.”
“About what, baby?”
“That I called you. That I cried so much on the phone.” She reached out and began picking nervously at a loose thread on her pajama sleeve. “Mama always says I’m too sensitive. She says I make a big deal out of nothing.”
I reached out and placed my legal pad face down on the table, giving her my absolute, undivided attention.
“Skyla, I need you to look at me.”
She hesitated, then slowly raised those heavy, dark eyes to meet mine.
“Calling someone who loves you when you are scared and alone is not being ‘too sensitive.’ It is exactly what you are supposed to do. Do you hear me? That is the entire point of having a grandfather.” I let the silence stretch for a moment before leaning in closer. “And just for the official record, I cried in a courtroom once.”
Her eyes widened in genuine shock. “You did?”
“I absolutely did. Full, heavy tears, right in the middle of a hearing. In front of a very strict judge, no less.”
“Was the judge mad?”
“The judge was decidedly unimpressed,” I admitted, allowing a small, wry smile to show. “But the jury understood exactly why I was crying. They knew it mattered.”
I stood up from the table, stretching my aching back. “Come on. Go get dressed. We are not spending the rest of the day sitting inside this house.”
“Where are we going?” she asked, her feet finally hitting the floorboards.
It was an excellent question. I hadn’t entirely figured out the logistics yet. But I knew with absolute certainty that we were not going to spend another hour breathing the stale air of a house filled with lopsided photo galleries and the lingering ghosts of every family vacation she hadn’t been invited on.
“We are going out to get lunch,” I told her, grabbing my keys. “Real food. Absolutely no more of my terrible eggs.”
“Thank God,” she deadpanned, completely serious.
I threw my head back and laughed out loud. It was the very first time I had laughed since my plane touched the tarmac.