Fernando’s parental rights were terminated in the June on his own voluntary relinquishment, which his attorney advised and which he signed without argument, and I have never known what to do with the fact that he gave her up in four seconds after all of it.

Sophia came home on the fifteenth day.

She came to a house in Schertz she had been in nine times in three years, to a bedroom that had been decorated for her in 2021 and that was now wrong for a six-year-old in every particular, and she stood in the doorway of it and said, “Whose room is this?”

I want to describe the first month accurately, because there is a version of a homecoming that people carry around and it is not this.

She was polite.