Loving Your Child Is an Instinct; Shielding Him From the Consequences of What He Did to Another Human Being Is Something Else Entirely — I Learned the Difference at Sixty, at the Door of a Chicken Coop

That is the machine.

It does not only trap the one inside it.

It poisons everyone who loves her, turns their love into confusion and hurt, so that no one comes looking.

I sat in that booth and understood that undoing it would take more than a lawyer.

It would take reconnecting, one by one, every line he had cut — and that the first and most important of them ran to a woman in Nebraska who did not yet know her daughter was alive and free and finally, at last, coming home to her.

Chapter 4 — The Report