And at the final custody hearing, the family-court judge — who watched the banquet video in the courtroom, and whose face, I was told, went hard and cold as it played — granted me full legal and physical custody of Fiona.

Luca received strictly supervised visitation only, contingent on his completion of anger-management and parental-accountability courses.

Wendy was sentenced to probation, community service, and restitution, and made subject to a restraining order keeping her five hundred feet from my daughter at all times.

I did not feel like I had won something, exactly, sitting in that courtroom.

Winning is the wrong frame for it.

What I felt was that a thing had finally been set right that should never have needed setting right — that a two-year-old had been given, by a system that too often fails children, the protection her own father and grandmother had denied her.