Maxine took off her reading glasses and let them fall against her chest.
"Ms. Brandt," she said. "I want you to listen to me, because I'm about to say something lawyers almost never get to say. The money is the easy part." She ticked it off on her fingers. "Your credit union has the cashier's check. The servicer has a payment history that shows exactly who paid and when, and third-party payments are flagged as third-party payments. We'll subpoena it. Your phone has a photograph of a document he signed, and the photograph has a date on it. He can say he doesn't remember signing it. He can say it was room and board. But the room and board argument has a problem, which is that nobody in the history of Minnesota has ever paid twenty thousand dollars for six months in a converted sewing room and the privilege of getting up at four in the morning with somebody else's infant. A judge is going to laugh at it. I am going to make sure a judge laughs at it."
Nora found that she was holding the arms of the chair very tightly. "And Linnea?"
Maxine was quiet for a moment.
"That's harder," she said. "I won't lie to you. Minnesota does have a third-party custody statute, but it's narrow, and it's built for situations where the parents are out of the picture entirely. You lived in the home with a parent present. Even if you did every bit of the caretaking, a judge is going to be very reluctant to give you standing over a father's objection." She leaned forward. "But you're not the only person with standing. You're not even the most important one."
"Tessa."
"Your sister is still married to him. Nobody terminated anything. She's the child's mother, with every right he has, and his petition is calling her an abandoner because she spent the year in medical treatment for a postpartum illness and called every Sunday." Maxine put her glasses back on. "I've been practicing family law in this county for twenty-two years. I've seen judges do a lot of things. I have never seen one rule that a mother abandoned her child by going to the hospital."
* * *
Tessa came up on the Jefferson Lines bus from Rochester the following Saturday, with a backpack and a paper bag of clementines and a letter from her treatment team folded in her coat pocket. Nora met her at the station on Superior Street in the dark, in the cold, and for a moment did not recognize her. Her sister was thinner than she remembered, and her hair was cut short, and she stood very still on the curb with the bus idling behind her, the way people stand when they have had to learn, deliberately and with great effort, how to stand still.