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Callie spoke with her by phone once contact was finally established, both of them crying through most of the call, according to what Callie told me afterward.
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“She’s okay,” Callie said. “Really okay, actually. The shelter helped her get connected with a program for teens aging out of unsafe homes. She’s finishing her GED. She asked about Hazel constantly, but she was completely certain about her decision. She said watching me hold her at the hospital was the first time she felt like the baby was actually going to be okay.”
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Nadia formally relinquished her parental rights three months later, working with a lawyer of her own that the shelter had connected her with, the process handled carefully and legally, exactly the way it should have happened from the very beginning, once everyone involved had the proper support to do it right.
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Callie’s guardianship transitioned into a formal adoption the following spring, six months after that first frightened conversation in my car outside the resort’s employee building. I served as a co-petitioner given Callie’s age, both our names on Hazel’s amended birth certificate now, an unconventional family structure that nevertheless felt, by the time the paperwork finalized, like exactly the shape our small family was always quietly building toward.
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Hazel is fourteen months old now, walking unsteadily around my living room most weekends when Callie brings her over, calling Callie “Mama” with the easy, uncomplicated certainty only a toddler can manage about something the rest of us spent considerable legal effort making sure was actually true.
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Nadia sends photos sometimes, through a careful, monitored channel Priscilla helped set up, updates on her GED progress, a college application she’s apparently working on for the following fall. Callie replies with photos of Hazel in return, a quiet, ongoing thread between two young women whose lives collided in a staff cabin bathroom one August morning neither of them ever could have planned for.
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