I collapsed onto the vinyl chair, the plastic sticking to the back of my bare legs.

“Tomorrow morning,” I whispered. “How am I supposed to find a lawyer by tomorrow morning?”

“I have a cousin,” Arthur said, sitting beside me and placing a calloused hand on my shoulder.

“He does family law here in Charlotte, and he owes me a favor from our days in the department.”

By eight o’clock the next morning, I was sitting in a small, windowless consultation room at the Mecklenburg County Courthouse.

Arthur’s cousin, a sharp-eyed woman named Clara, was busy sorting through the documents I had provided.

She looked at the psychiatric record Patricia had submitted, then at the USB drive containing the security footage from our front porch.

“This medical record is from a brief period of grief counseling two years ago,” Clara said, her pen tapping the table.

“It holds no weight regarding your current fitness as a mother, especially when contrasted with what we have here.”

She plugged the USB drive into her laptop, and the screen lit up with the footage of Landon dragging his suitcase past me.