⸻
“And you said yes,” I said.
⸻
“I said yes,” Callie confirmed. “Two weeks ago. Nadia left four days later, once she felt strong enough to travel. She said she’d send legal paperwork once she was somewhere safe. I don’t fully know where she went. I have a phone number that might not even work anymore.”
⸻
I sat with all of it for a long moment, the baby stirring slightly against Callie’s shoulder before settling again.
⸻
“Callie,” I said carefully, “I need you to understand something. However good your intentions were, this isn’t something you can simply decide alone, in a resort cabin, without any legal process behind it. This baby needs documentation. A birth certificate. Proper guardianship paperwork, at minimum, until we can locate Nadia and get her to formally relinquish her rights, if that’s actually what she wants.”
⸻
“I know,” Callie said, tears finally falling. “I know it’s complicated. I just couldn’t leave her there, Mom. Nadia begged me. She said I was the only person who’d shown her a single ounce of kindness all summer, and she trusted me more than any stranger a hospital or a shelter might have handed her baby to instead.”
⸻
I called a family lawyer the following morning, a careful, direct woman named Priscilla Nash who specialized in exactly the kind of complicated custody and guardianship situations neither of us had ever once expected to need advice about.
⸻
“The first priority,” Priscilla told us both, sitting in her small downtown office, “is establishing emergency guardianship properly, through the court, rather than simply keeping the baby informally. That protects both Callie and the child if anything about this situation gets more complicated later.”
⸻
“What about Nadia?” I asked. “Don’t we need to find her first?”
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“We need to make a genuine, documented effort to locate her,” Priscilla said. “The court will want to see that effort clearly recorded before finalizing anything permanent. If she’s genuinely unreachable after reasonable attempts, there’s a legal process for that too, though it moves considerably slower.”
⸻
We filed for emergency guardianship that same week, the baby, whom Callie had already started calling Hazel, receiving a proper newborn medical exam that confirmed she was healthy despite the unconventional circumstances of her birth.
⸻
Locating Nadia took considerably longer than either of us hoped. The phone number Callie had led to a disconnected line within days of trying it. Priscilla’s office worked with a private investigator over the following six weeks, eventually tracing Nadia to a domestic violence shelter two states away, where she’d apparently gone directly after leaving the resort, using a different last name to avoid her stepfather locating her.
