Every foster child carries a private theory of why they were given up, and the theory is always, at bottom, a verdict on their own worth.

Mine had been the quiet, corrosive certainty that I had been unwanted — that a mother had looked at me and decided I was more than she was willing to carry, and let me go.

I had built my entire understanding of myself on that verdict.

It was why I took up no space.

It was why I expected nothing.

It was why, when a handsome man told a lonely woman he would never let her be alone again, the lonely woman believed him against all sense — because underneath everything, she believed she had to earn the right to be kept, since the first person who was supposed to keep her had not.