Meanwhile, my aunt talked about her spare bedroom and her private school plans, her vacation house by the sea. But no one spoke about the way he clung to my hand when he was afraid. No one spoke about the way he laughed again, slowly, when I tried to make normal evenings for us.
Except me. And somehow, that was enough. The judge took a long moment before speaking, eyes thoughtful.
She did not look at me as she stood to leave. She did not say goodbye. When we stepped out into the sunlight, my brother ran into my arms.
He laughed then—a real, breathless laugh that seemed to shake the sorrow loose from the air around us. “We won, didn’t we?” he asked. I knelt in front of him and brushed his hair from his eyes.
“Yeah. We did.”
Life did not magically become easy after that. Money was still tight.
The walls still needed painting. Some nights, grief crept back in, quiet and sharp, like the memory of a bad dream. But hope had taken root in the cracks.
We built routines, we created traditions, and slowly, the empty spaces in the house began to feel inhabited again. Months later, one afternoon, he handed me a folded piece of paper. It was a drawing of the two of us standing in front of our house.
The sky was a messy swirl of blue crayon, the windows shining yellow. Above our heads, he had written five simple words in his slanted, careful handwriting. This is where we belong.
I stared at it for a long time, then pulled him into a hug. He was right. Nothing, no court, no calculated smile, no greedy hand was ever going to take that away from us.
