Four homes.
Different towns.
Different vehicles.
Different adults promising frightened children that everything would somehow work out.
Carter couldn’t stop imagining the moment the siblings realized they were not all getting into the same car.
He pictured one child asking where another was going.
He pictured someone saying, “Just for now.”
He pictured little hands reaching backward as doors closed.
That image followed him to breakfast.
It followed him to work.
It followed him home.
Finally, he stopped trying to convince himself that the situation belonged to somebody else.
He emptied his savings account.
He bought five children’s car seats.
He cleared out his workshop and began turning it into a shared bedroom with bunk beds.
The space wasn’t luxurious, and Carter never pretended it was.
He was trying to answer a practical question as fast as he could: if someone told him five children couldn’t stay together because there was nowhere for them to sleep, could he remove that objection?
When the room was ready, he used what money remained to hire a family-law attorney.
That decision brought him to the courthouse.
Now the state’s attorney stood before Judge Miller explaining why effort and good intentions did not make Carter qualified to take responsibility for five very young children.
The attorney called him impulsive.
Naive.
A well-meaning young man who had no idea what raising five children at once would require.
Carter listened without interrupting.
Some of the words hurt because part of him feared they might be true.
He was terrified.
That was the part nobody needed to prove.
He was terrified of getting something wrong.
Terrified of discovering that determination was not enough at three in the morning with a sick child and four others depending on him.
Terrified of the money.
Terrified of the exhaustion.
Terrified that wanting to protect these siblings might not mean he was capable of doing it.
But every time those fears rose, Carter looked at the five children sitting together.
The possibility of failure frightened him.
Their separation frightened him more.
