There was only the closing of a door that should never have been opened.

What mattered to me was not her sentence.

What mattered was the other hearing, eight months in, the family-court one, where a judge granted me permanent legal guardianship of Ollie and Josie Renfro, and I stood up in a courtroom and became, by law, the person responsible for them for the rest of their childhoods, and afterward I went into the courthouse restroom and locked the door of a stall and cried until I couldn’t.

Not because I’d won.