His expression tried to remain brave, but one of his hands was shaking.
Carter stared at that hand.
Suddenly he wasn’t looking at a stranger anymore.
He was looking backward.
He remembered another courthouse.
Another group of five children.
Another six-year-old trying to hold on to his younger sister because he had no other way to protect her.
Carter stepped toward the microphone.
He took one slow breath.
“Because I was six years old the last time I sat beside my own four siblings in a courthouse,” he said. “I was the oldest, just like him. I kept my arm around my little sister until a caseworker called our names. Then five children were sent to different homes.”
Judge Miller said nothing.
Carter continued.
“The adults said it was temporary. It wasn’t. Addresses changed. Families moved. Years passed. By the time I was old enough to search for everyone, we had become five separate lives. I’ve never managed to get all of us into the same room again.”
The words became harder to push out.
For years, that memory had existed as something private.
A fact from childhood.
A wound that time had covered without actually repairing.
Now Carter was saying it in a courtroom because five children he had never met were standing at the edge of the same kind of separation.
His voice caught.
He kept going.
“I’m not asking this court to erase what happened to me. I’m asking you not to repeat it with them.”
The state’s attorney lowered the page he had been reading.
Judge Miller turned toward the social worker.
“Have the separate transports begun?”
“No, Your Honor,” she replied. “The vehicles are waiting downstairs.”
That answer changed the urgency of the room.
The separation wasn’t theoretical.
It wasn’t something that might happen the next day or the following week.
The cars were already there.
The children could walk out of the building together and then be divided before leaving the property.
Judge Miller reached for the placement order.
“Then no child leaves this building until I say otherwise.”
Carter felt the meaning of the sentence immediately, but he also understood what it did not mean.
The judge had not approved an adoption.
He had not promised Carter custody.
He had not declared that emotion could replace an assessment of whether one person could realistically care for five children.
He had simply stopped the clock.
For the first time that morning, the siblings were no longer minutes away from being driven in four different directions.
That pause mattered.
It also created a harder question.
Stopping something was not the same as proving there was a better alternative.
Judge Miller made that clear.
Compassion, he warned Carter, was not the same thing as preparation.
Carter didn’t argue.
He hadn’t come into court expecting anyone to ignore the obvious difficulties because his intentions were good.
He knew a converted workshop and five car seats did not automatically make him ready for five children.
He knew the court had responsibilities that went beyond responding to an emotional story.
So he answered the concern directly.
He told the judge he wasn’t asking anyone to pretend he was ready.
He was asking for the chance to prove he could become ready before the children were forced to pay for the court’s caution.
That distinction mattered to him.
He wasn’t asking the court to gamble with the children because of what had happened to him decades earlier.
He was asking the adults in the room to consider whether separating the siblings should really be the first solution rather than the last one.
Across the room, the five children still sat together.
The youngest leaned against one of the older siblings.