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The little boy is just a few months shy of his fourth birthday, and with luck by then he'll still be oblivious to the legal and emotional hurricane that has swirled around him for nearly all his short, happy life.

Last week, the state Supreme Court issued a landmark ruling —for New Mexico, anyway — that clears the way for the boy's adoptive parents to complete the adoption and that thumps biological father Mark Huddleston for stepping up to the paternity plate too late to matter.

"More is required, it would appear from the statute, than merely filing a responsive motion in an adoption proceeding, especially when Mark knew for months about the pregnancy and took no steps to establish paternity until more than two months after his child's birth," Justice Richard Bosson wrote for the unanimous court.

Huddleston, an Albuquerque account executive and a father of two grown children, has insisted he did not know that the child's mother, identified in court records as Helen G., was pregnant. He has said that once their six-month relationship ended in June 2003 she refused to have any contact with him.

The mother testified in court that she told Huddleston twice she was pregnant.

The baby was born Feb. 14, 2004. Three days later, Rosario and Bobby Romero of Los Lunas welcomed that tiny bundle home.

Two months later, after Huddleston's new wife opened a letter from the Albuquerque agency Adoptions Plus, the agonizing battle over the boy began.

Despite last week's decision, the battle will continue.

Huddleston late last week said he plans to keep fighting for his son, even if it means taking the case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

"It's not over," Huddleston vowed. "You'll see real soon what happens next. I'm not going divulge that."

Huddleston on Monday referred calls to his new attorney, Angie Schneider-Cook, who said her Ruidoso law firm was hired last week to review the latest ruling and ask the court for a rehearing. She conceded such an endeavor is "an uphill battle."

She declined to say what the next step would be after that. "I can only say with some authority that Mr. Huddleston has not given up," she said.

The Romeros' attorney, Hal Atencio, has advised the family to remain mum publicly until the adoption is final.

And so it continues. More court battles, more money, more anger and pain, and the chance the little boy in the center of it all could have his world shattered by the very people who love him.

As loving and stable a home as the Romeros have likely made for the boy, eventually he will wonder where he came from. He will wonder whether his biological mother and father loved him, and if they did, then why they let him go.

Those of us who have adopted know that no matter how hard we try, no matter how much we love, there will come that day when our children will ask those questions and seek some way to fill that hollow spot where, for better or worse, the chain of life was broken.

Conversely, removing children from the only mommy and daddy they have ever known is virtually child abuse with deep and long-ranging consequences.

Huddleston in the past has acknowledged as much but said he isn't the one who erred in keeping him away from his son.

On the day he said he learned he had a son, Huddleston hired an attorney and signed up with the state putative father registry. Soon afterward, he filed a paternity lawsuit to contest the adoption and underwent a DNA test to prove he was the father.

He did everything he could, just not as quickly as the state Supreme Court says he needed to.

State law requires a father to file with the putative registry within 10 days of the child's birth or establish a "custodial, personal or financial relationship" with the child before birth and long before adoption.

Would that the Romeros and Huddleston find a way of sharing the baby.

But Huddleston has said the battles with the Romeros have been so vicious that he doubts the adults in this case can ever work together.

So the hurricane howls, angry and foreboding and closer than before, and almost surely far from over.