I didn’t know you could feel your heart break and rearrange itself in the same instant. One moment I was on my knees on the porch, the next I was in motion—calling, driving, signing forms with trembling hands, saying “She has me” so many times it became less a promise and more a vow. The world labeled Nora a medical case, a custody case, evidence in a manila folder. I learned to see her as something else entirely: a small, fierce person whose heart needed mending but was never, not once, the problem.
Years folded around us—surgery scars fading, laughter getting louder, the word “Mommy” settling on me like it had been waiting there all along. I never read Claire’s apology. I chose instead to read bedtime stories, school forms, crayon notes taped to the fridge. In the quiet between days, I understood: justice didn’t look like revenge or courtroom victories. It looked like showing up, again and again, for the child someone else walked away from—and discovering that in saving her place in this world, I’d finally found my own.