A home is the people who will climb a fence for you.

It is the mother who stands in a doorway and the father who crosses a city and the old woman next door who finally makes the call.

Maya has all of those.

She has more home than most kids with two parents under one roof, because hers has been tested in the fire and it held.

She squeezed my hand and her mother’s, one in each of hers, holding us together across her own small body the way she’d been trying to for years, and this time we let her, and this time it held, and I closed my eyes in the warm shade and let myself, at last, believe it was over.

THE END.