It was small, and quiet, and local, which was what made it so hard to detect.

She preyed on both ends of tragedy at once — on families too shattered to read the forms she slid across their tables, and on comfortable people impatient with the slow honesty of legal adoption — and she set herself in the middle as everyone’s kind helper.

In her own private journals she never once wrote the true word for what she did.

She wrote placement assistance. Family relocation support. Her fee, per child, ran from thirty thousand dollars to over a hundred thousand.