Done Adulting Vol. 2 Ch. 2

“Hi, Stacy.” Stacy wasn’t expecting her friend and Department of Human Services employee at her office. It wasn’t as a friend but as the latter that the sight of him made her nervous. They rarely saw each other except at mutual friends’ events, and it was through one of those friends that Ben had approached Stacy eight years ago about adopting Ella. That he was here and unannounced surely meant nothing good.

“Ben! What’s going on,” she replied unsteadily.

“Sorry to interrupt you at work, but I thought you’d want to know this right away and would want to hear it from me.” Not comforting words; Stacy turned pale.

“Just tell me what’s wrong.”

“Someone in our office screwed up a records request, and Ella’s human family knows she’s here.”

When she was rescued, eight Itali years and almost twelve Earth years after she went missing, Ella had made the choice not to notify her family. She had never been able to fully articulate why, even to herself. But she made peace with herself and what had happened to her, and she regarded her old life as over and gone. She hoped her family had healed, and she was loathe to disrupt that healing, or even the careful image she had crafted in her own mind of her family happy again years after what she knew was the most traumatic experience they could have gone through, worse even than her death, for they had not the comfort of finality but the constant, faded but ever faint hope that one day she might reappear.

Now, sixteen years later, more than two decades on Earth, all that was wiped away, and somewhere, Stacy didn’t know exactly, some father and mother were likely tied up inside with euphoria, relief, fear, and anger in gordian knot. Perhaps they were equally uncertain as to what this meant as Stacy, but they likely as intent on at least seeing Ella as Stacy was on protecting Ella, even or especially if that meant keeping them away from her.

What Stacy said, she said as unadorned fact without conscious thought: “They can’t have her back.”

“No one is talking about that yet,” Ben calmly replied, anticipating that response.

“There is no ‘yet!’” She’s mine, I’m hers! Period. They can’t have her back!”

“Stacy, I know this is hard, but please know this isn’t unprecedented. It’s a little more complicated because Ella is a rescue – that’s never happened before – but we’re getting ahead of ourselves.”

“What ...” Stacy sighed. She wasn’t sure what question to ask and, if she had, whether she wanted to know the answer. Ben let the silence hang there. He wasn’t a lawyer, and his concern was not the law anyway, but for Ella’s well-being. “What do we do now,” Stacy asked.

“Right now, I think you need to think about when to tell Ella, and how to tell her.”

“Do I have to? Is there any way this could blow over without her finding out?” Stacy couldn’t game out Ella’s reaction, but Ella had never voiced any regret about her decision to remain a ghost, as it were, and she rarely made even passing reference to her home or family. Stacy knew little about them and had never had a reason to ask Ella about anything she didn’t volunteer, which was almost nothing. She was content to not know; she’d wanted to understand, she suspected the reason wasn’t a happy one, and she’d allowed herself to stop wanting to know for reasons she didn’t especially like about herself.

“I doubt it,” Ben answered. “They may or may not try to come here or contact her. There’s no legal basis for us preventing that.”

“Couldn’t a judge prevent that,” Stacy asked. Her voice carried weak-willed hope, the conflicting instinct to protect Ella and yet be honest with her.

“We’d need to convince the judge it was in her best interest, but that might mean Ella having to tell the judge as much.”

“I thought littles couldn’t testify.”

“That’s not exactly true. A judge decides whether their testimony is admissible on a case-by-case basis based on how regressed they are,” Ben explained.

“Ella isn’t regressed at all.”

“I know.”

Stacy stood up from her desk and walked to the window, looking down on the street below at all the people whose lives had not changed in the past five minutes, who would go home to their families and look at them the same way they had when they’d left for work in the morning. The sun cut through a blue sky, shining as it always has on the happy, the mundane, the dramatic, the tragic, and now the foreshadowing of whatever outcome was in Stacy and Ella’s future. All Stacy knew was that it was their future together, and she was even then in process of resolving that their future would be together.

“I wanna talk to a lawyer,” Stacy said to her own weak reflection in the glass.

“I think that’s smart, as a precaution, and I think you should talk to a little’s psychologist. The department has one who works with rescues.”

“Neal. I remember him,” Stacy said, recalling the man who had helped craft Ella’s transition to Itali eight years ago.

“He retired. The new one is Kunis. Margaret Kunis. I’ll arrange a meeting for you. She can help you figure out what to tell Ella and when, and where to go from there.”

“I can’t believe this is happening.”

“Nothing is happening yet. All we know right now is the family knows.”

“What will they do next?”

“Probably contact their consulate.”

“How did this even happen,” Stacy asked.

“We’re looking into that.”

Stacy turned and fell back into her chair, glancing at the time. “I gotta go get her soon. For PT. How do I put on a brave face?”

“You’ll manage because that’s what’s best for her.”

“Ya know,” Stacy said quietly, “I don’t even remember what her name used to be.”