Her name, he told me, was Daisy, and she was nine years old now.

They had come into the foster system together when he was small and she was barely more than a baby, and from the very beginning, he said, he had been less a brother to her than a parent.

“I basically raised her,” he said, and his voice cracked clean down the middle.

“When we were little.

In the homes we were in together.

I made her breakfast.