When she thinks she can see him without crying again, she holds her baby close and walks silently back to Rana's.
The room has been replaced with - something else. She has no idea what this means. She has nobody to ask but Rana. Everything she asks places her further in his debt, of course, but it hardly matters now.
She steps inside.
"She wants to do what you tell her to do, fine. If she doesn't, and you hit her, then you get in trouble."
"I am worried that we'd be dependent on all of you and wouldn't be able to take care of ourselves. And I don't know under what circumstances we would or wouldn't be able to come back."
"You'd probably need money, assuming he won't work, but - not very much money, not enough we'd even notice it. And you could come back, if you wanted to. If it doesn't work I don't want you to be stuck."
Nodnod.
So they head upstairs.
" - I don't actually have anything specific to say, I just - didn't want to keep talking in front of everyone - "
Nodnod. "We can just back out of all this and go back to court if we want. We had a plan. It was a good plan."
He looks around the room. Then he pulls the sheets off the bed, picks up the mattress, and hauls it off until it tips over and half-rests on the other bed.
He makes a nest out of the blankets.
"C'mere."
Hug.
"I'm - scared that they're trying to change a bunch of things about how we are, and making you argue about it, and - I felt like how we were was - I don't know how I want to think of it, or what to call it, or how it's going to be once we leave court again, but - I'd almost stopped feeling scared about it, and then people started - making all of these claims about how bad it is - and I'm scared that if anybody else touches it everything will get worse, somehow - "
"I keep feeling like - every time I touch you, every time I need something from you, we're accumulating some kind of invisible debt we don't know about but which all of them can see, and they hate us for it -"
"You - you love your kids and you want them to be happy but you also - want them to be yours and want the chance to be in their lives and want people to know they're yours - and it doesn't mean you don't love them -"
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