And so when Reyes said the word permanent, what moved through me was not administrative satisfaction.

It was the specific animal relief of a grandmother who has been braced, for half a year, against the possibility of losing the only piece of her daughter she had left.

Veronica was mine to raise now, in law and not just in love, and no one could come and take her, and the money that should have been her mother’s was locked away where it would carry her through school and into a life.

It was the safe harbor I had been swimming toward through the worst year of my life without ever being sure it existed.