Rina spends years believing that decency, patience, and love ought to be enough to carry a family through a crisis. Then rows harden into a system. Agreements turn into tests of power. Concern becomes a life of proceedings, bills, accusations, and hope measured out in careful portions.

What looks orderly from the outside becomes, for her, a form of open custody: weekend contact on call, courts that only ever see fragments, a child caught between loyalties, and years of proof that she did not walk away, but was steadily pushed out.

The Years in Open Custody is an autobiographically inspired novel about exclusion without judgment, about the indifference of families and institutions, and about the question of how much remains of a person after too long spent merely enduring. It is also the story of a woman who, after ten lost years, no longer waits for miracles, but for the chance to make a life again out of what is left.