What if five was genuinely too many for one man and I ended up being one more adult who failed them, one more set of hands that let go?

What if I gave up my whole life and it still wasn’t enough, and I had to watch them get taken anyway, older this time, having learned to hope first?

I had no answers.

I had lain in the dark and stared at the ceiling and been more afraid than I’d been since I was a child myself.

The difference between me and the careful man at the state’s table wasn’t that I was braver or surer.

It was that he was weighing a risk to a plan, and I was weighing a risk against a certainty — the certainty of what would happen to those children if no one stood up, which I did not have to imagine, because I had lived inside it.