“Margaret.”

“I know your name. I’ve known your name since 2004.” She gestured at a chair. “Sit down, I’m not going to fight with you. I haven’t got the wind.”

I sat.

“You want to know why I took her,” Roberta said.

“I’ve wanted to know for twenty years.”

“Because my sister was dead and that girl was blood.” She said it the way you’d state a road number. “That’s the whole of it. There wasn’t more. I was fifty-six years old and I had a job at a hospital laundry and I had buried my sister in February and in September somebody rang me and said there’s a child in Maine in a foster placement and the state wants to know if any family will come forward.