The words my child stopped the room cold. Danielle’s hand froze on the taped drawing. My mother turned to me with the smile she always wore right before she said something cruel. “Your child?” she scoffed. “Cora, you don’t have children. That’s the entire point of all this.” Then her eyes drifted to the woman standing quietly by the bookshelf, a county folder open in her hands, her pen already moving across the page. My mother’s smile wavered. “And who exactly is this?”

Bernadette Fowler introduced herself by title, calmly, as the caseworker completing the final placement review for Hazel and Elias. The blood drained from my mother’s face. My father stopped halfway down the hall. Danielle looked between us, still not understanding, her fingers slipping off the child’s drawing. “Placement review for who?” she demanded. I walked to the shelf, lifted the two wooden name signs I had hung the night before, and held them up so every person in the room could read them. “For the children I have spent nine months being approved to adopt,” I said. “The children you drove here to throw into a garage.”