Three weeks after the hearing, Camila enrolled in her nursing program.
Not the deferred version, not the contingency plan — the full program, at the Lisbon school, starting in September. She filled out the forms on a Tuesday evening after Daniel was in bed, at the kitchen table with the lamp that had the warm bulb that she'd finally, two weeks ago, replaced.
It felt like the right kind of ending to a particular chapter. Not the end of all of it — she was too realistic for that kind of thinking — but the end of the version of herself that had been on hold. The girl who'd had to stop in order to manage what was happening had become a woman who had managed it, and now there was room for the rest.
She told her mother first.
"Finally," her mother said.
She told Bianca, who said the word co
