Fourteen months of a small life spent in a facility, handed from evaluation to evaluation, while family after family looked at a single page describing her and decided, each in turn, that they could not.

Fourteen months is not a long time in the life of an adult; it goes by in a blur of ordinary weeks.

But fourteen months in the life of a child that age is very nearly the whole of it, is everything she has ever known, is the entire foundation on which the rest of her will be built.

In those fourteen months a baby learns whether the world is a place that holds you or a place that hands you back.

She learns whether crying brings comfort, whether reaching brings connection, whether the faces that appear will stay.