In January, Dana came back.

Not for a visit. She sat in my living room with a folder and told me, in the careful voice people use when they are about to be professionally unpleasant to someone they like, that the placement had been flagged in a quarterly review.

“It’s not a complaint,” she said. “Nobody’s complained. It’s the file.”

The file said that on a Wednesday morning in October, a caseworker had placed a six-month-old infant with a fifty-six-year-old woman whose foster license had been dormant for eleven years, on the strength of an hour’s conversation, on the same property where the infant had been left by a person who was at that time a missing adult in an active criminal matter.

“When you write it down like that,” Dana said, “it’s not a great paragraph.”

“You said it would be a few days.”