Updated Mar 22, 2026 • ~8 min read
Chapter 25: Full Custody
Mrs. Peralta had, in fact, made food.
She’d made tamales — two dozen, because that was how Mrs. Peralta understood celebration — and she’d done it, as best Maya could calculate, before they’d even gotten the verdict, which meant she’d started sometime in the morning on the faith that today was going to be worth celebrating. The apartment smelled incredible and Emma was at the kitchen table with a spoon and a bowl of beans and the serene happiness of a child who had no idea how today had gone but was certain that tamales meant something good.
Maya stood in Mrs. Peralta’s doorway and took it all in.
“You knew,” she said.
“I knew that woman,” Mrs. Peralta said, stirring something on the stove, “and I knew that judge has been on the bench for nineteen years and she didn’t get there by being foolish.” She didn’t turn around. “Emma, tell your mama what you told me.”
Emma looked up from her beans. “I said you were going to win because you always win,” she said, with the certainty of a child who had observed the evidence and drawn the appropriate conclusion.
Maya felt her throat tighten. She crossed the kitchen and crouched down and pulled Emma into a hug that Emma returned with her whole small body, arms around Maya’s neck, face pressed to her shoulder.
“We won, bug,” Maya said, into her daughter’s hair.
Emma pulled back and looked at her face with the careful assessment she used for important things. “Is the bad man gone?”
“He’s gone.”
Emma processed this. “For good?”
“For a very long time.”
She nodded, once, in the decisive way she’d inherited from no one Maya could identify and assumed was simply Emma being Emma. “Good,” she said. “I didn’t like worrying about him.”
Maya stared at her. “You were worried?”
“Sometimes.” Emma picked up her spoon again. “When you thought I was asleep and you were talking to Reaper-Jack in the kitchen. I could hear you being scared.” She said it without drama, just reporting. “I was quiet. I didn’t want to make you more scared.”
Maya sat back on her heels. Two years she’d spent managing this — keeping the fear out of her face, out of her voice, building the walls between what she felt and what Emma saw. And Emma had heard it anyway, through walls, from a half-sleeping four-year-old vigilance that broke Maya’s heart to learn about.
“I’m sorry,” Maya said.
“It’s okay.” Emma offered the spoon diplomatically. “You were brave anyway.”
Jackson, who had been in the doorway behind Maya, made a sound that might have been something he’d swallowed.
Emma pointed at him with the spoon. “Reaper-Jack. The pause is over.”
He looked at her. “Who told you —”
“You said later.” She pointed, still with the spoon. “It’s later.”
A beat of silence. Then Jackson looked at Maya, who was still crouched on the kitchen floor, and raised his eyebrows in the expression that meant she did have a point.
Maya stood. She turned to face him.
And she kissed him. Right there in Mrs. Peralta’s kitchen, in front of Mrs. Peralta who said nothing but whose silence had a very loud texture, and in front of Emma who said “finally” with the exhausted relief of someone who had been very patient for a long time.
He kissed her back — warm and real and unhurried, his hands on her face the way she’d been missing for three weeks — and it lasted long enough that Mrs. Peralta resumed stirring her pot with the cheerful determination of a woman who had seen everything and was delighted by most of it.
“Finally,” Emma said again, in case anyone hadn’t heard the first time.
They stayed at Mrs. Peralta’s for two hours, which turned into three, because the tamales were as good as they smelled and because Mrs. Peralta had apparently been waiting two months to tell Jackson everything she thought of him, which took time, and because Emma needed to recount the full day’s events to Rosie and Fair and Storm and Gerald in the corner of the living room, and these things all required presence.
Jackson sat on Mrs. Peralta’s small couch and listened to her talk and ate tamales and looked, Maya thought, like a man who had found somewhere to be and wasn’t in any hurry to leave. She watched him from across the room — watched the way he accepted Mrs. Peralta’s frank, warm assessment of his character, which included several observations about him being “solid” and “the real kind of good,” delivered with the directness of a woman who had earned the right to say whatever she saw.
He took it with the same equanimity he brought to everything. He thanked her, simply, and meant it.
Emma fell asleep on the couch around seven, tucked against Jackson’s side with Fair in her arms and Rosie watching from his knee, and Maya looked at the three of them in the lamplight of Mrs. Peralta’s living room and felt the word again. Home. But larger now, less like a place and more like a condition — this, exactly this, was what home had always been supposed to mean.
They walked back to the house in the desert dark, Emma carried against Jackson’s shoulder, sound asleep, and Maya walked beside him with her hand in his and the night warm and quiet around them.
“She said finally,” Maya said.
“She’s been saying it in her head for a month, probably.”
“She was listening through the walls.” Maya looked at the stars. “She knew I was scared.”
“Kids know.” He adjusted Emma against his shoulder with the ease of someone who had carried her before and would carry her again. “They know more than we give them credit for.”
“I thought I was protecting her.”
“You were. Not from knowing, maybe, but from having to carry it alone. That’s what protection looks like most of the time.” He paused. “You carried it so she didn’t have to.”
She thought about that. About all the ways protection worked — the visible ones and the invisible ones, the ones that cost you and the ones that cost you everything and the ones that were just showing up every day regardless.
“I love you,” she said, to the stars. And then to him: “I like saying it.”
“Say it as much as you want,” he said.
“I love you. I love you. I love you.” She counted them. “How’s that?”
He looked sideways at her, and the smile — the full, real one she’d been earning incrementally for months — was entirely visible in the dark.
“Good,” he said. “It’s good.”
They went home. She put Emma in her yellow room with her animals arranged on the shelves exactly as Emma had arranged them, her own specific order, and she stood in the doorway for a moment and looked at her daughter asleep in this bed in this room and thought about what it had cost and what it had given back.
Worth it. Everything.
She went to find Jackson.
He was in the kitchen, which was where he always was at this hour, coffee and book, and she sat across from him at the table and he looked up from his book and looked at her.
“Hi,” he said.
“Hi.” She put her elbows on the table. “No more pause.”
“No more pause.”
She held his gaze. “I want to sleep in your room tonight.”
He looked at her steadily. “Because you don’t want to be alone?”
“Because I want to be with you.” She said it without qualification. “Specifically. That’s the reason.”
He closed his book.
She reached across the table and took his hand, careful of the small bandage Patricia had insisted on from the courthouse first aid kit, and she held it.
“So,” she said. “How’s this going to work?”
He looked at their hands. Looked at her.
“However you want,” he said.
She smiled. She hadn’t been doing that enough — smiling on purpose, for herself, for the pleasure of having something to smile about. She was going to start doing it more.
“Okay,” she said. “Let’s start with that.”
She led him down the hall and the house was quiet and warm and theirs, and somewhere in the yellow room Emma slept peacefully with her animals and her certainties, and outside the desert night went on in its vast, unhurried way.
And Maya Santos, who had driven away from Phoenix with three hundred dollars and a running car and a daughter in the backseat and no destination but away, was finally, completely, unreservedly home.
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