Every family that came and looked and went, every gentle hand that held her and then handed her back, was a small lesson in the same hard subject: do not count on anyone, do not give your heart, protect yourself.

And Maya had sat through fourteen months of that curriculum and learned exactly none of it.

She still reached for the collar of every stranger who held her.

She still looked up into every new face with her whole open trust, unguarded, undefended, offering herself to the next person and the next as though this one, surely, would be the one who stayed.

The people around her called that indiscriminateness, a thing to be noted in her file.