And because I have, I will burn down everything I own before I let those five kids spend one night wondering if they’ve been thrown away.”

I hadn’t planned to say it that way.

It came out of somewhere below the part of me that plans.

But I meant every word of it, and I think the room could hear that I did, because when I stopped talking no one moved at all — not the gallery behind me, not the attorney at his table, not the judge on his bench — as if the ordinary machinery of a courtroom had paused for a moment to make room for something that doesn’t usually get said out loud in one.

Chapter 10 — Enough Love