“They need each other. This house, these people, this exact situation—it’s all they have left.”
“You’re eighteen,” she said, without cruelty. “You don’t have a steady income. The house is two mortgage payments behind. There are seven children between the ages of six and fifteen. I can’t just abandon them…”
“I’ll work,” I said. “I’ll have an income. I’ll work out the mortgage. I’ll learn everything I need to learn to make this work, and I will, but you can’t separate them. If you separate them now, you’ll do damage to these children that no amount of steady income can repair.”
Mrs. Hart looked at me for a long moment. There was something in her expression—not dismissal, but something older and sadder, the look of someone who has seen many eighteen-year-olds make promises they couldn’t keep.
“Love isn’t always enough,” she said.
“I know that,” I said. “So tell me what else I need. Write it down. Give me a list.” But don’t separate them while I sort this out.
She sighed, closed her folder, and looked at the table. “I’ll request a sixty-day evaluation period,” she said finally. “That gives you time to demonstrate stability. But, Rowan… it has to be real stability. Not just good intentions.”
“Understood,” I said.
She left. I stayed at the kitchen table for a long time afterward, alone, staring at the crack in the wall above the refrigerator that my father had been wanting to repair for three years.
Then I got up and started writing a list.
**Part Three: The Courthouse**
Aunt Denise arrived at the first hearing wearing an authority-colored jacket and with the particular confidence of someone who had decided the outcome beforehand and was just waiting for the paperwork to confirm it.
She was my mother’s older sister by eight years. I had known her all my life. He sent birthday cards that always arrived a little late and Christmas presents that always fell a little short—things chosen for a version of us that existed in his imagination, not in reality. He had attended family gatherings with a carefully guarded distance, as if proximity to seven boisterous children could be contagious. He had never, to my knowledge, cared for any of us. He didn’t know Tommy’s middle name. He once called Benji “baby” all through Thanksgiving because he couldn’t remember which name went with which face.
Now he appeared before the judge and expressed, with visible emotion, how much he cared about our well-being.
Uncle Warren stood beside him with a folder, which I later learned contained financial statements and a letter from his family lawyer.
“I understand Rowan means well,” Denise told the judge, in that voice of someone being very reasonable. “But we have to be honest about the situation. A child can’t raise children.” I’m willing to keep the two youngest—give them stability, a real home…
“The two youngest?” I said.
The judge looked at me. My lawyer—a young public defender named Grace, who had received my case forty-eight hours earlier and had prepared with visible and impressive speed—placed a hand on my arm.
Denise turned to me with a smile that didn’t reach her eyes. “I know this is difficult, dear. But you can’t save everyone.”
“I’m not trying to save everyone,” I said, and then I looked directly at the judge because Grace had told me to look at the judge. “I’m trying to keep my family together. There’s a difference.”
The judge was a woman in her sixties with reading glasses hanging from a chain and the expression of someone who had seen it all. She leaned slightly forward. “Do you understand what you’re really asking for? Full temporary guardianship of seven children?”
