Esme was in my house for five hundred and eleven days before a judge entered a permanent order about where she lived.

She learned to sit up, to crawl, to walk, to say eleven words, to climb the third stair, and to say Tía during a period in which her legal status was, formally and on paper, temporary.

 

Part Twenty: What Actually Happened That Morning

I got it from my sister, in pieces, across about two years, and most of it in one sitting in the June of 2024 in a room at a family therapy practice in Elmhurst with a third person present, which is the only way she and I are permitted to have that kind of conversation and which I now think is the only way anybody should.

Some of it I have from the DCFS file and from her own statements.