For a year, Maya had been living in a world where the truth of her own experience was contested territory — where what she felt was called drama, what she remembered was called manipulation, what her body knew was called faking, and where even her mother met her fear with a gentle correction.

To live like that, I understand now, is exhausting in a way that reaches all the way down into the appetite and the sleep and the singing.

A child spending all her energy just to hold onto the reality of her own life against a world insisting she has it wrong has nothing left over for growing, or laughing, or being fifteen.

And the thing that gave it all back to her was not the custody ruling, though the ruling mattered, and not Richard’s punishment, which she took no pleasure in.

It was the simple, daily, repeated fact of being believed.

Of saying a thing and having it received as true.