Felicia had spent a decade thinking of my children as an abstraction — a problem, a scandal, a piece of evidence that needed to stay far away in Ohio’s blind spot.

She had never once had to think of them as small warm actual people who could be frightened, or grabbed, or hurt.

And when she reached for Clara, she found out, in the space of half a second, exactly what stood between her and my daughter.

Not a broken woman.

Not the girl she had thrown out of this family a decade ago.

A soldier and a mother, whose hand closed on her wrist like a trap and stopped it dead.