June nodded.
“It means Daddy will be my daddy on paper too. And I’ll be June Rhodes.”
“Do you want that?”
“Yes. Very much.”
“Why?”
June thought carefully.
“Because he found me when I was alone. Because he feeds me when I’m hungry and helps me when I’m scared. Because he loves me even when I mess up. Because Ember is my best friend and my sister, and I want the same family name as her.”
The judge smiled.
“And your middle name?”
June looked at Declan.
“I want Sarah.”
Declan closed his eyes.
Sarah.
His wife’s name.
Ember squeezed June’s hand.
“My mommy would have loved you,” she whispered.
“I think she loves me from heaven,” June whispered back.
Declan signed the papers with a hand that shook only once.
The judge stamped the final page.
“By the power vested in this court, I declare the adoption finalized. June, you are now legally June Sarah Rhodes.”
For one second, June stared as if the words were too large to understand.
Then she turned to Ember.
“I’m really Rhodes?”
Ember threw both arms around her.
“You were already my sister. Now the paper knows too!”
June laughed.
Loudly.
Freely.
A laugh with no fear hiding underneath it.
Declan opened his arms.
“Come here, my daughters.”
They ran to him together.
Both of them.
His daughters.
Six months earlier, June had been sleeping against a brick wall with a broken doll, unwanted by every place that should have protected her. Now she was in a courthouse, wrapped in the arms of a father who had not planned for her but had chosen her completely.
Margaret cried.
Sandra cried.
Even Judge Hamilton blinked more than necessary.
Outside, Margaret took photographs until the girls begged for cake. Declan bought the biggest family album he could find that afternoon. June placed her adoption certificate in the first page.
Then she wrote her new name on everything.
Napkins.
Scrap paper.
The back of an envelope.
Her hand.
June Sarah Rhodes.
“I need practice,” she said.
Three months after the adoption, the Rhodes house was no longer recognizable as the quiet museum Declan had once lived in.
Drawings covered the walls.
Toys appeared in impossible places.
Crayons lived on windowsills.
The refrigerator became a gallery of family portraits, school projects, butterfly stickers, pancake schedules, and one very important drawing titled Our Heart.