For days, I had tried to make it explain an absence.

This blanket did not have to explain anything.

It could simply be clean and blue and useful.

When the visit ended, Mara did not ask me to bend the schedule.

She gathered her papers, checked the next date, and let the supervisor lead her into the hall.

At the doorway, she paused.

“If I had gone back with them before the order, I would have been asking the wrong person for permission to keep my own children.”

Her attorney, beside her now, said they would continue addressing that concern through the proper proceedings.