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Ah, yes.
Well, we sent an email to her mom, detailing the situation and making it very clear that we did not want a war and were not looking to go to court, only to honor my stepdaughter's wishes as she had made them very clear to us. Stepson was surprisingly upset by the whole thing. He didn't want to live with us, but the idea of his sister being in a different place was as traumatic a concept for him as someone's parents getting divorced.
Anyway, the mom flipped out as expected, sat in on sobbing counseling sessions with my stepdaughter, promised to be a better person, and within 2 weeks my stepdaughter was already talking about how she "wasn't sure" what she wanted anymore. Then she accidentally let slip that last March, when her mother finally agreed to let her go gluten-free, it had apparently only happened because my stepdaughter had been threatening to come live with us, which we did not know. So clearly we are her go-to blackmail, and she never really thought she'd end up living with us after all. We were super pissed off to be used like that, but relieved that our lives weren't going to be upended after all.
Nowadays things are reportedly somewhat better over there according to my stepdaughter, though still rough at times. Supposedly the wheels are in motion for them to finally move out of the family home, which ought to help. (Grandmother, two aunts, and a random great-aunt and great-uncle are currently living in the house along with my two stepkids and their mom. It's a 5,000 square foot house so there's room for them all, but the emotional abuse crosses all generations as one might predict, and some of the stories we hear are astounding.) But it's taking forever because the mom--who will tell any stranger on the street her tale of financial woe as a single mother--has decided that the only thing she could be happy with is a brand new house, built from the ground up to her specifications. So that's not due to be finished until June at the earliest.
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