Chapter 1 — Courtroom 3B

I’m twenty-nine years old.

Single.

No wife, no fortune, no big house with a hallway of empty bedrooms waiting to be filled.

What I have, right now, is a seat on a hard bench outside a family courtroom and a clear view of five children I am about to either keep together or lose forever.

They’re all seven and under.

They’re pressed into one another on a plastic bench across the corridor, the way you’d huddle against cold, each of them holding some part of the next — a sleeve, a hand, a fistful of coat — as if letting go might be the thing that finally breaks the world open.

The oldest is holding the baby.

The oldest is seven.

In less than an hour, a judge could sign a piece of paper that sends them to different homes.

Different families.

Different counties, maybe.

The system has a phrase for it that manages to sound almost gentle: placement split. Two words, clean and administrative, for the act of taking five children who have already lost everything and cutting the last thing they have left — each other — into pieces.

I have spent almost everything I own to be sitting here.

I have a lawyer I can barely afford and a case most people told me I had no business bringing.

And I am so frightened that my hands won’t quite stay still, because I know something the paperwork doesn’t, something I have never said out loud in any office or on any form.

I know exactly what it does to a child to be driven away from the only family they have left.

I know because it was done to me.