Judge Ellison took off her glasses.
She looked at Grant for a long, cold moment.
“Mr. Bennett,” she said. “In twenty-six years on this bench, I have seen a great deal of what desperation does to people.
I have rarely seen it do this.”
She turned to the room.
“The document purporting to surrender this infant is a forgery and a fraud.
The purported placement is void.
Custody of the child is restored, effective immediately, to her mother, Claire Bennett.”
The gavel came down.
And the whole courtroom — the detectives, my family, the strangers, even the Harmons through their tears — did not cheer, because it was not a cheering kind of moment.
They exhaled.
Two hundred years of held breath, all at once.
A social worker walked out of a side room.
She was carrying a bundle.
A small one, in a hospital blanket, with a tuft of dark hair and a face I had waited seven months and would have waited seven lifetimes to see.
