My Family Sold Me for Their Favourite Daughter novel · Chapter 18 of 24

Chapter 18: The Petition

The woman from the bus shelter drove me to the nurse practitioner's house and refused to take any money.

I slept on a fold-out couch under a quilt that smelled of cat.

On Monday at nine I walked into Courtroom 4B in a borrowed blue blazer, with a folder under my arm.

Benton sat at the petitioner's table with a partner from his firm, and his hair was combed exactly as it had been in the parking lot of the raid.

My mother sat behind him in the first row.

She wore cream wool and her pearls, and when I came in she gave me a small, sad smile for the room.

Callie was not beside her.

The judge was a woman in her sixties with reading glasses on a chain, and she looked at the full gallery before she looked at me.

"This is a petition for guardianship of an incapacitated adult," she said. "I note that the respondent is present, represented by no one, and apparently not incapacitated."

"Your Honor," Benton's partner began, "Ms. Lowry has a documented history of self-harm, delusional claims and flight from a lawful hold."

"I have the same file you do. Sit down. Ms. Lowry, do you want counsel?"

"I'd like to speak for myself, Your Honor."

"Then you will."

I put the folder on the rail.

The judge took it herself and turned the pages, and the gallery waited.

The kidney doctor's record was on top, with six fractures named in plain words and her signature at the bottom.

Behind it was a typed page from the psychiatric unit.

"What is this one?"

"A nursing note," I said. "The nurse on my unit wrote it the night I was admitted. She's in the hall, and she took the day off to be here."

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