Chapter 5: Her Grandmother’s House
The courts sorted out quickly what my heart had sorted out already.
The adoption stood, and a kinship claim I didn’t even have to fight was simply, finally, true.
I am Georgie’s grandmother.
I am also, now, her mother, which is a strange and holy thing to be at sixty-eight, and I would not trade it for any easier life.
She will grow up knowing exactly who she is.
I tell her about Laurel every single day — her real mother, my brave, stubborn, beloved girl, who was on her way home to me with this child in the back seat when the world took her.
I show Georgie photographs. I tell her Laurel’s laugh came a half-beat late, just like hers.
I kept Buttons mended and clean, and someday, when she’s old enough, I’ll show her the name in her mother’s rabbit and tell her it was mine first, then her mother’s, now hers.
