"Thank you for letting me know." The words tasted like battery acid. "Is there anything else?"
"Just..." Sandra sighed. "Keep doing what you're doing, Ms. Santos. You're a good guardian. Mia is lucky to have you. I'll be in touch about the evaluation schedule."
After that, she hung up.
I stood in Cal's office with the dead phone in my hand and tried to remember how to breathe.
Two-parent household.
As if I could conjure a partner out of thin air. As if anyone would look at my life and decide that was something worth signing up for. The custody battle, the traumatized kid, the twenty-four-hour shifts, the fear and the chaos and the barely-holding-it-together.
I didn't do relationships. Never had. That would mean handing my heart over to someone else, letting them hold something they could break, and I'd learned too young what happened when you gave people that kind of power. They used it. They always used it.
So I’d kept myself closed off. Casual dates, occasionally, when the loneliness got too loud to ignore—but nothing serious. Nothing that could touch me. Nothing that would leave a mark when it inevitably ended.
And now that belief had consequences. It was going to cost me my sister.
It took a moment to set the phone down. When I did, I did it carefully, precisely, like it might shatter if I moved too fast. I walked out of Cal's office with my shoulders squared and my face blank. Found a spot behind Engine 7 where no one could seeme and pressed my back against the cool metal until my heart stopped racing.
Eight months. Two-parent household. Todd—my stepfather—the man I learned early not to trust. His lawyers were already building their case.
The walls were closing in, and I was running without finding a way out.
My lunch break was thirty minutes. I spent twenty-seven of them in the station bathroom, sitting on a closed toilet lid, scrolling through legal documents on my phone.
Todd's latest filing glowed on the screen, each paragraph a carefully crafted knife.
The petitioner contends that the respondent, Riley Santos, lacks the stability and resources necessary to provide adequate care for the minor child...
I read it twice. Then a third time. Let the words sink into the place where I kept all the things that could destroy me if I thought about them too hard.
Todd Harris. My stepfather. The man my mother had married when I was sixteen, when she was desperate and in the grip of addiction and convinced that any man was better than no man. He'd seemed charming at first. They always did. Bringing flowers and fixing things around the apartment and calling me "sweetheart" in a voice that made my skin crawl even before I understood why.
The first time he hit my mother, I was sixteen and a half. Six months after they started dating. She’d burned dinner. Hebackhanded her across the kitchen. Afterward, he apologized for an hour while she cried and told him it was okay—that she understood, that she shouldn’t have been so careless, that she deserved it.
I remember standing in the doorway, frozen, watching my mother comfort the man who’d just split her lip. Watching her apologize to him, saying it was her fault. Something broke inside me that night. Something that never quite healed right.
The first time he hit me was six months later. I was already seventeen. I don’t remember what I’d done wrong—because it doesn’t matter. It never needs a reason. I remember his fist connecting with my face. The crack of my head against the doorframe. The way the world went white, then red, then narrowed to a single point of pain above my left eye.
I remember my mother's face afterward. She wasn’t angry, but she wasn’t protective either. She was just tired, almost resigned, like this was inevitable, like I'd brought it on myself.
"You shouldn't provoke him, Riley. You know how he gets."
I knew. I learned. I made myself small and silent and invisible, counted the days until I turned eighteen like a prisoner marking time on a cell wall. And when that birthday finally came, I packed a backpack in the middle of the night and walked out the door without looking back.
Except I did look back. Once. At Mia's window, where a four-year-old face pressed against the glass, watching me leave.
"I'll come back for you," I'd whispered, even though she couldn't hear me. "I swear to God, Mia. I'll come back."
It took me six years. Six years of working three jobs, putting myself through the fire academy, building a life stable enough to convince a judge I could take care of a child. Six years of watching from a distance while my mother spiraled deeper into addiction and Todd's control tightened like a noose. Six yearsof Mia growing up in that house, learning the same lessons I'd learned, building the same walls.
My mother died of an overdose when Mia was ten. I'd been twenty-four, freshly certified, working my first real firefighter job three towns over from West Valley Springs. I'd driven through the night when I got the call, arrived at the hospital just in time to identify the body.
I didn't cry. I couldn't. There was too much to do, too many forms to sign, too many decisions to make. And underneath it all, a fury so hot it burned clean through grief: she'd chosen this. The pills, the men, the slow surrender. She’d chosen all of it over us. Even dead, I couldn’t forgive her.
And then I'd fought. For two years, I'd fought. Court dates and caseworkers and lawyers I couldn't afford, Todd contesting custody because Mia wasn't his daughter but the survivor benefits were, because hurting me was the only hobby he had left, because men like him didn't let go of things they considered theirs.
I'd won. Temporary custody, then provisional, then something that felt almost permanent. Mia was mine. She was safe, away from him.
