She filed in the January of 2025 and it was final in the September and he did not contest anything, and she has an apartment in Glen Ellyn — not the one in the photograph, a different one, one bedroom, on the second floor.

Two years too late.

I want to write this part very carefully, because it is the thing in this account that I cannot make come out right and I have stopped trying.

The permanency goal changed in the November of 2023.

Private guardianship was entered in the March of 2024.

I am Esme’s guardian.

Perla did the thing in the November of 2024.

She did exactly what the service plan had asked her to do in the January of 2023, twenty-two months late, after the court had already moved, and there is no mechanism anywhere in that system that runs backwards.