Chapter 118: Two Hours on a Saturday
The envelope had three documents in it and a covering letter from Doyle of four sentences.
The first sentence told me what I had, legally, in relation to Ethan Blackwood.
Nothing.
I had known that for eighteen months, but there is a difference between knowing a thing and reading it in a lawyer’s font.
Illinois gives a former caregiver no standing of any kind.
I am not a parent. I am not a relative. I am not a guardian and I am not a stepparent.
There is no petition I could have filed and no order I could have asked for.
Doyle put it in one line at the end of the letter. She was not being cruel. She was being economical.
There is no cause of action called I raised him.
So the envelope did not contain rights. It held three pieces of paper a man had chosen to sign and could unsign.
The first was an authorization for the release of protected health information.
The same form Moreno’s office used in 2026 for a dead woman’s records. I had held one of those in a hallway with my hands shaking.
This one had my name in the blank.
It authorises the practice of Elias Moreno, MD, to disclose information concerning the minor E.B. to Lily M. Carter, and to accept history from her.
Signed by the parent. Dated the fourteenth of March 2028. Valid twelve months, renewable in March.
Revocable at any time, in writing, without a reason.
The second was shorter and I have thought about it more.
A letter to a preschool in Evanston adding me to the emergency card and the list of persons permitted to collect him.
Fourth name. After the father, the grandmother in San Antonio, and a woman from an agency.
The third was one page and no court has ever seen it.
A contact schedule. Two hours on alternate Saturdays. Reviewed each January. Terminable by him on written notice, no cause required.
It is not an order. It is not a contract. If he changed his mind on a Tuesday it would end on a Tuesday.
Ferro’s office had put a fourth thing in the draft. Doyle took it out at my instruction before it was sent.
A retainer. Two thousand dollars a month, described as childcare advisory.
I said no in a telephone call of ninety seconds.
I had spent eighteen months on an invoice with one line of description and eighty-five thousand dollars on it.
I was not going to have one of my own.
There is another reason, smaller and truer.
You cannot take money from a man every month and also be the person who tells him what he does not want to hear.
That job was taken in that family, and the woman who took it is in Fort Wayne.
So I kept the agency work at seventeen dollars an hour, signed the schedule, and posted it back the same afternoon.
The first Saturday was the twenty-fifth of March 2028, at the public library in Evanston, in the children’s room.
He was two years and eight months old.
I had not been alone in a room with him since the ninth of November 2026.
Here is what I was afraid of.
That he would not know me, and that I would then have to be a stranger being kind for two hours.
That is not what happened, and it is also not what people want to hear happened.
He looked at me for about four seconds with his hand on his father’s knee.
Then he came over, put a book in my lap, turned round and sat down on my feet.
Not in my lap. On my feet.
He has always done that.
Then he got up again and went to look at the door, because the door had opened.
He did it at seventeen months in a doughnut shop I was watching from two tables away. He did it at two years and eight months in a library.
I have never asked a professional what it means, because I do not want an answer that turns him into a case.
We read the same book four times.
He counted the stairs on the way up to the lobby.
Four, five, seven. Every time.
Always the same mistake in the same place, and he was perfectly satisfied with it.
At the top he put his arm straight up, palm open, and said his word, and then a second word after it, which was new.
Victor was in the lobby the whole time with a newspaper he did not turn over once.
That is the arrangement. It has not changed since.
Twenty-two Saturdays in the first year.
He missed none of them.
I missed one, on the ninth of September 2028, and I have the date because it is in my handwriting on a laboratory schedule.
A microbiology practical, eight in the morning, no make-up sitting.
That is the first thing my education ever cost that child, and it would not be the last.