Chapter 117: Sole Surviving Parent
There was never a custody case.
I want that understood before anything else.
People assume there must have been. There was not, and there was never going to be.
Victor Blackwood is Ethan’s father and Ethan’s only living parent.
Illinois does not appoint a guardian for a child who has a living, fit parent.
The DCFS finding was against Serena Montigue and against nobody else in that house.
Their case on Victor closed with no finding on the nineteenth of January 2027.
Odette Kramer’s appointment as guardian ad litem ended when the criminal case ended.
She wrote a final report of eleven pages. I have never read it.
So the boy stayed where he was, with the man who had been in Houston.
That is not a happy ending and I have never described it as one.
It is the law, and the law had one thing right: he is the father.
What changed was on paper, and it took Victor from September 2027 to March 2028.
The first thing was the house.
He listed Astor Street on the second of October 2027 and sold it on the fourteenth of February 2028 for seven million nine hundred and fifty thousand.
He did not tell me. I read it in the transfer records.
They moved to a four-bedroom in Evanston with a maple in front of it.
The nursery there is on the ground floor. There is no corridor. Nobody has ever said that out loud.
The second thing was the travel, and here I have to be fair and unimpressed at once.
In 2026 Victor Blackwood was away from his son one hundred and eighty nights.
In 2028 he was away seventy-one.
That is not redemption.
Seventy-one nights is still ten weeks.
He sold nothing and gave up nothing. He hired a president for the Houston side to do the flying.
A man with his money can buy that. Most fathers cannot. I record it as a fact, not a virtue.
The third thing is the one that matters and it is four pages long.
On the fourteenth of March 2028 Victor executed a will.
Under section 11-5 of the Probate Act a parent may nominate, in a will, the person to be guardian of a minor child.
The court is not bound by it. In practice it follows the nomination unless somebody objects and proves a reason.
He nominated Dolores Reyes of San Antonio, Texas.
Ana’s mother. Ethan’s grandmother. Sixty-one, a school district administrator for twenty-six years, and a woman I had never met.
She had been at the funeral in December 2025 and had not been inside that house since.
Nobody had stopped her. Nobody had invited her either, and in that family those are the same thing.
Victor flew to San Antonio on the eighth of September 2027 and stayed two days.
I do not know what was said. I have never asked.
What came back was a schedule, typed, one page, and a nomination.
Ethan goes to San Antonio for two weeks each July. Mrs. Reyes comes north twice a year, in April and at Thanksgiving.
The first two weeks were in July 2028. He was three.
He came back with a Spanish word for water and would not use the English one for a month.
Alongside the will he executed a short-term guardian designation under section 11-5.4.
That one takes effect the moment a parent signs it and lasts sixty days.
It is for the gap. It decides who has a child at four in the morning if a man does not come home from Houston.
It names Dolores Reyes, and an alternate, and the alternate is Harriet Doyle, who told him not to.
And then the last paragraph, which is why I have any place in this at all.
The designation directs that in the event it takes effect, Lily M. Carter is to be notified within twenty-four hours.
Not appointed. Not consulted. Notified.
I read that word for a long time.
I had spent nineteen months being the person nobody had to tell anything.
The investigator did not have to tell me. The hospital did not have to tell me. The State’s Attorney told me as a courtesy and said so.
A woman without standing does not get told. That is what standing is, with the law taken out of it.
Notified within twenty-four hours is not a right, not custody, and not love.
It is a line in a document that says, if the worst happens, somebody picks up a telephone.
I have thought since that it is the smallest thing Victor Blackwood could have written and still have written something.
I have also thought that it is more than his mother got.
She appears in that will once, on page three, in a clause barring any respondent in case 2027 P 000414 from serving.
She is not named. She does not have to be. There was one respondent who was a grandmother.
The form Doyle posted me on the fourteenth of March was a different document, and there were three of them.