When no one else would have.”

There is a particular relief in that word, guardianship, that I had not expected, and it is not really about the paperwork.

For six months, under everything else, I had carried a low steady dread that some technicality, some judge, some distant relative or overworked agency, might decide that a woman my age was not the right home for a small girl — that the very thing that made me right for her, that I was the last of her blood who had loved her mother, might be counted against me as too old, too grieving, too alone.

I had lain awake with it.