“I know what happens,” I say, “when you close a car door and drive a child away from the last of his own people.

I can tell you, because I’ve been on the inside of it.

You don’t separate them for a few months and then patch it up at Thanksgiving.

You break something in them that doesn’t grow back the same.

You teach a child, in the most convincing way there is, that love runs out.

That family is a thing that can be revoked.

That when the lights go off at night and they’re scared, nobody is coming — because the one time it mattered most, nobody came.”