Caseworkers. Forms. Temporary arrangements.
Words like placement and evaluation floated through conversations that didn’t seem to include her, even though they were about her.
I heard myself speak before I had time to think.
“Let me take her home. Just for tonight.”
Even then, I think part of me understood—nothing about that night was temporary.
One night stretched into something else.
Days turned into routines. Routines into habits. Habits into something that started to resemble a life.
I learned things I had never imagined needing to know.
How to braid hair without pulling too tight.
How to tell the difference between a nightmare and a memory she couldn’t explain.
How to exist on exhaustion without letting it show.
The first time she called me “Dad,” it wasn’t planned.
No big moment. No buildup.
Just a grocery store aisle, fluorescent lights overhead, her voice cutting through something ordinary and making it permanent.
I didn’t react.
Not right away.
I just stood there, staring at something in the freezer section that I couldn’t see anymore, trying to hold my face still.
Because some things feel too big to move around in.
She grew.
That’s the simplest way to say it. But it doesn’t capture the way it happened.
She grew into someone who filled space—not loudly, but completely.
Quick-witted. Observant. Stubborn in quiet ways. She noticed things other people missed.
Sometimes, she would look at me with an expression that felt older than it should have been.
As if part of her was always remembering something she couldn’t fully articulate.
We talked about her past carefully. In pieces.
Never all at once.
“You didn’t lose everything,” I would tell her. “We found each other.”
I believed it.
Or maybe I needed to.
Years later, life had settled into something stable enough to feel real.
Then Marisa came into it.
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