“My little girl,” she said, and her voice barely rose above a whisper, cracking apart in the middle of the three small words.

Tears filled her eyes and spilled over before she could stop them.

Here was the one person in the world she had made, the one good and innocent thing her life had produced, standing in a prison visitation room hours before the state intended to take her away forever, and there was not a shackle strong enough or a wall thick enough to hold a mother’s heart still against that sight.

Three years is a very long time in the life of a young child, long enough that Elena had braced herself, on some level, for the possibility that her daughter would arrive as a near-stranger, that the toddler she remembered would have been replaced by a girl who barely knew her.