The judge smacked her gavel down almost instantaneously as every eye in the courtroom turned to look at me.

“Order, order,” the judge said. “Young lady, you need to take a seat.”

Properly admonished, I hastily took a seat, though I couldn’t help but notice the judge attempting to hold back the slightest of smiles on her face. Aunt Lydia leaned in to whisper in my ear.

“Don’t worry, when it’s our attorney’s turn, they’ll have a rebuttal for what was just said.”

I took a deep breath and picked aimlessly at my fingernails while the hearing moved on. At last, it was our lawyers’ turn to speak. My doctor and therapist were both called as witnesses. The doctor explained, in greater detail than I felt was necessary, that my bladder problems were an entirely physical issue, and didn’t reflect one way or another on my mental capacity. Miss Amanda testified that my mother’s attorney had misrepresented her therapy notes, and that I had been socializing as well as could be expected, given my circumstances.

We were nearly an hour into the hearing. Both sides were supposed to get thirty minutes apiece. And my bladder was aching. This wasn’t the typical urge to urinate that makes you want to squirm and cross your legs. The kind where if you laughed to hard or got tickled in the wrong spot your bladder’s floodgates might open up. This was painful. The only comparison that felt appropriate would be if my bladder itself was cramping up.

No one would know if I wet the diaper. mean, this is why I had worn a diaper instead of a pull-up in the first place? A risk of a leak was basically non-existent. The diaper was absorbent enough that I could wear it the rest of the day with no leaks happening, not that I would ever do that given how uncomfortable that would be.

Giving in would be so easy. Relax my bladder for fifteen, maybe twenty seconds. The diaper would take care of the rest. The pain would be go away. I could live to fight another day.

“Annabelle. Annabelle.”

My head jerked upright at the sound of my name. One of our attorneys had walked forward to the waist-high barrier that separated the audience from the remainder of the courtroom. The arguments from both sides had concluded. Now it was time for the judge to determine the outcome.

“The judge would like to talk with you,” he said, before I could think of a non-embarrassing way to excuse myself to run off to the restroom.