My son had been robbed of that ground so young and so thoroughly that he could stand in the center of it and feel only the ache of its absence.

And so the work ahead of me, I understood in that doorway even before the DNA confirmed it, was not only to keep him safe.

It was to give him back the thing every other child simply has: the deep, wordless certainty of belonging somewhere, of being someone, of having a home that was his by right and could not be taken.

It would take years.