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keep things kind of blurred...and in the background via denial. Denial has abandoned me and I’m not happy about it.” I pouted like a five year old.
    “Doodle, there’s no question Wyatt got the shit end of the stick early on in life. But then, he got you. You have been everything to that little boy and he is growing up to be this delightful, beautiful little person because of it. And if you decide to stay closed off and single for the rest of your life,” she made a face, “then he’ll still grow up to be a good and decent man, because of you. ”
    Aunt Deb had a way of putting things into perspective. She was right. If there was one thing in my life I was always proud of, it was Wyatt. Maybe she was off on just how much she thought my parenting played a role in his awesomeness, but the point was, he would grow up to be amazing no matter what I did to fuck things up along the way.
    Of course I also couldn’t ignore the fact that I probably wouldn’t be single for the next fourteen years of my life. I mean, I was only twenty-nine. I was in the prime of my life for crying out loud. And it wasn’t like I’d gone out of my way to be single all this time. It just sort of happened...and now I wasn’t sure how to make it un-happen.
    While I spent the remainder of the night pondering this slight predicament, come morning it was all forgotten when I opened the door to find a process server standing on the other side, holding out a manila envelope for me to take.
    Things went from stressful to full on nightmarish when I read the papers inside. Travis was taking me back to court. And he was going for full custody. Worse, he was trying to have my rights terminated all together. For the last week I’d told myself every day, all day long, that it would never come this far. No judge on earth would entertain any such requests.
    Apparently, I was lying to myself.
    After another week of non-stop phone calls and meetings with my lawyers (most of which had been more like surprise visits to her office) I was walking back into that courtroom.
    This time, we had a different judge. Apparently Judge Harrows, who had overseen our case before, had retired two years ago. This new twist in my fate was enough to send me into a full-on tizzy, but I kept it together and marched on until I reached my seat at the front of the room beside Diane.
    The hearing was preliminary. Nothing would be decided today. Mostly, it was a matter of Travis’s lawyer presenting his case and why he had decided to bring us all together again after nearly four years of blissful peace.
    His lawyer, an older guy with white hair and a full beard, who surprisingly enough looked nothing like Santa Claus, gave a pretty boring speech for about ten minutes, citing all of the reasons Travis had been victimized by me and the system and how we were the big bad monsters who had stolen his son right out from under him. I did my best to tune him out altogether, just to keep from laughing loudly at half the shit he said. Then, he got to the point.
    “Your honor, the reasons the courts believed they had three years ago for making their decisions simply no longer exist. My client is a good man and a good father, which has been proven in the last year since he married his wife and became a father to her two children. He has a good job with a steady income. He can offer his son the kind of security Joss Kelley clearly cannot. She is a single woman in her twenties, who by her own admittance has never had a consistent partner.  She also has a spotty work history and an income which fluctuates from month to month. I ask you, your honor, where is the stability in that?”
    The words hit me like a fucking freight train. Three years ago, the fact that I was single and worked from home had been to my advantage. There’d been nothing keeping me from committing myself one hundred percent to being Wyatt’s mother, which was precisely what had happened. Now, suddenly, these were my biggest