I don’t anymore.

What I believe now is what Brandon showed me that morning: that the door of your home is yours to hold, that access to your child is not an entitlement anyone is born with, not even a grandmother, and that a person who spends three years teaching a seven-year-old she doesn’t belong has, by her own steady choices, revoked her own key.

Brandon didn’t take anything from Gene that she hadn’t already thrown away with both hands.

He just made it real, on an index card, in his plain handwriting, and let the door close as quietly as it had needed to open loud.