Gail had spent a career watching well-meaning adults do damage to children — not through cruelty, usually, but through need, through an adult’s hunger that got pointed at a child who was in no position to refuse to meet it.

So she looked at the grown-ups before she looked at the kids, and she asked the hard questions first, and the hardest question she had was the one she asked me that afternoon with her elbows on her cluttered desk.

“I’m going to ask you something difficult,” she said quietly.

“Are you trying to replace your children?”

The question landed like a hand against my sternum.

I understood, even in the sting of it, that she had to ask.