I will only say that I stood in that hallway with our sister’s sleeping daughter against my chest and my estranged brother’s stunned silence in my ear, and I understood that everything, the nine years of feud, the empire, the walking away, all of it, had been leading, without any of us knowing it, to exactly this hallway and exactly this child and exactly this phone call.

Maya stirred against me and made a small soft sound, and I held her a little closer.

I keep returning, when I tell this story, to the almost unbearable symmetry of it, the way the cruelty and the mercy were braided together so tightly.

It was the family feud that had driven Evelyn into hiding, that had made her feel she had nowhere to turn, that had left Maya without listed kin and delivered her into the system.

The very same brokenness that had failed my sister had abandoned her daughter.