The system hadn’t merely failed Birdie; it was now turning itself, deliberately, against the one person who had filed on her behalf.

I went to my room for my briefcase.

Under my grade book was a folded square of construction paper — a small blue bird in a cage, but the cage door drawn wide open, and beneath it, in a wobbly six-year-old hand: Please don’t stop being nice. I put it in my pocket, and whatever numbness I’d walked in with turned into something colder and far more useful.

Chapter 19 — The Old File

Amanda Fenn worked out of a glass tower over the Ridgeport skyline.

She listened to all of it — the drawing, the grip at the gate, the rock, the leave — pacing, then dropped a thick folder on the table.