She had dark, bright, curious eyes, and she studied my face with the open, unafraid attention of a person who has not yet learned to be careful with anyone.

“She’s like that with everyone,” the woman said, and I understood that she meant it kindly, as information, but the words landed wrong in me even then, and I have never forgotten them.

She’s like that with everyone.

As if Maya’s warmth were a defect, an indiscriminateness, a failure to properly withhold herself.

As if a fourteen-month-old who had been passed from stranger to stranger her whole life ought to have learned suspicion by now, and her failure to learn it were somehow a mark against her.

I looked down at the small girl gripping my collar, gazing up at me with her whole open face, and I thought: no.