“Who attacked you with a pair of scissors. And you’re still luckier than her last few targets. Tell me you haven’t written back.”

I said nothing.

He thinned his lips, stern face radiating disapproval. Then, abruptly, he sighed. He returned the loose sheaf of papers to the top of my desk, then crossed to my pink ruffled bed and sat down heavily. He was sixty-five by then. A trim, gray-haired geneticist who’d probably been thinking he was too old for this.

“You remember there are two kinds of family,” he said, not looking at me.

I nodded. This was familiar territory, trod by most adopted children. There are two kinds of family: those that are given, and those that are made. Birth families are given. Adopted families are made. At which point, most adoptive parents launch into an enthusiastic sales pitch on how much better it is to be made. Other kids only wished they could pick their parents, their siblings, etcetera, etcetera. Look how good it is to be you!

My adoptive father had spent my formative years reading me many books on the subject. Child of My Heart. One-Two-Three-Family! Except my father had extra credibility when he said he couldn’t have loved me more if I’d been of his own blood; he didn’t have any birth children. Or a wife. Dr. Adolfus Glen had been not just a perfectly content bachelor, but a perfectly content loner till the day he met me. And while he might not have been the most demonstrative father in the world, I never doubted his love. Even as a child, I recognized his rare integrity, his quiet dignity. He loved me, genuinely. And for a man such as him, that was everything.

“You don’t have to choose her,” he argued that day. “Shana might be the family you were given, but for very good reasons, she was also the family who was taken away. If this note were written by your father, would you still be reading it?”

“That’s not the same!”

“Why? They’re both killers.”

“She was a just a little girl—”

“Who grew into a psychopathic adult. What’s her body count these days? Three, four, five. Have you asked?”

“Maybe what she did, who she is . . . Maybe it wasn’t her fault.”

He regarded me steadily. “Meaning maybe if she hadn’t been exposed to your father’s insatiable appetite for violence? Spent night after night witnessing his depravity, while you were shut away in a closet?”

“The first five years of a child’s life are the most important,” I whispered, having just completed my undergrad degree. “I was only in that house one year. She spent four. Meaning the majority of her key development phase . . .”