"Hey Siri, Call Daddy": My Three-Year-Old Called Me From the Outside of My Father's Yacht. Nobody Could Explain How She Got There.

Nine days later, a process server knocked on my door at seven in the morning.

He handed me a thick manila envelope and said, "You've been served."

Then he was gone.

I opened it standing on the porch in my socks.

IN THE SUPERIOR COURT OF CHATHAM COUNTY, STATE OF GEORGIA.

DARNELL ANTOINE PRICE, PETITIONER.

PETITION TO SET ASIDE DECREE OF ADOPTION FOR LACK OF NOTICE TO BIOLOGICAL FATHER.

I read the first page three times before the words made sense.

Then I sat down on the porch steps because my legs wouldn't hold me.

The petition argued that the state had never made a proper effort to locate and notify the biological father before terminating parental rights. That Darnell had been serving his country overseas. That under Georgia law, the adoption should be declared void.

Void.

It asked the court to place Zuri in the "temporary custody of her biological father" while the case was decided.

It described me as "a single adoptive parent whose documented failure of supervision resulted in the near-death of the minor child."

I don't remember calling Ethan.

Not my brother-in-law. My lawyer. Ethan Shaw, who had handled the adoption and Simone's estate, a careful, gray-haired man in Savannah who wore bow ties and spoke slowly.

He came to the house within the hour.

He read the whole petition at my kitchen table while Zuri ate cereal in the living room, watching cartoons.

When he finished, he took off his reading glasses.

"Ryan," he said. "I'm not going to lie to you."

"Can he do this?"

"He can try. And he has a real argument." Ethan rubbed his eyes. "The state's search for the father was thin. One newspaper notice in a county he didn't live in. No military records check. If a judge decides he wasn't given due process…"

"Then what?"

Ethan didn't answer right away.

"Then the adoption could be vacated. And legally, you'd be— nobody."

Nobody.

I looked through the doorway at my daughter.

She was laughing at a cartoon dog. Milk on her chin. Simone's beaded lanyard around her neck.

"He told me he just wanted to see her," I said. "He stood in front of me and shook my hand and said he just wanted to see her once."

"Maybe he meant it at the time."

"He lied to me."

Ethan picked up the last page of the petition and turned it toward me.

"Look at the attorney of record."

HARGROVE, BELL & VANCE LLP. ATLANTA, GEORGIA.

"So?"

"So Hargrove Bell is one of the most expensive litigation firms in the Southeast," Ethan said quietly. "Their partners bill nine hundred dollars an hour. A firefighter-paramedic from Miami doesn't hire Hargrove Bell."

He set down the page.

"Somebody's paying for this, Ryan. And it isn't Darnell Price."

That afternoon, I drove to the school early.

I stood outside Zuri's classroom window and watched her for twenty minutes before the bell rang. She was sitting at a little round table with three other kids, building something out of popsicle sticks. Concentrating so hard her tongue poked out of the corner of her mouth.

When she saw me through the glass, her whole face lit up.

She waved with both hands.

I waved back.

And I thought: I held you over the ocean.

I held you in a hospital bed when your blood sugar was 38.

I held you when you screamed for your mother at three in the morning for a year.