It is the grammar of how children fall through cracks: everyone following a reasonable-sounding rule, no one person ever looking at the whole of what the rules were doing to an actual boy and an actual little girl, until the damage was years deep and had no author anyone could name.”

“The history was in the records somewhere,” I said.

“You knew.

Someone knew.

Why was it never once raised with me, the woman actually adopting him?

I was angrier than I let my voice fully carry, because anger would not help the children and might frighten Gail into the defensive crouch that institutions take when they sense blame coming.

But underneath the measured questions I was furious — furious that I had been allowed to adopt half a story, furious that a boy’s entire reason for being who he was had been left out of the file as though a sister were an administrative footnote, furious most of all on behalf of two children who had been kept apart by a chain of careful, reasonable, cowardly adult decisions that each individually made sense and together added up to a quiet atrocity.”

“Direct contact between the children was restricted years ago,” Gail said, and I could hear her retreating into the defensive language of policy.