My eyes scanned the room. My child welfare social worker, Jen Pierce, was sitting in the corner with a thick file in her hands. Nancy wasn’t there. A horrible thought occurred to me, one I’d never considered before now. Oh God oh God. My lungs stopped working. I sank into the nearest chair, staring at the pained look on Diane’s face. “You’re giving me up, aren’t you? You’re ten-daying me.”

It had happened to me so many times before. But I’d started to believe it wouldn’t happen with Diane, that her house was where I belonged. I should have been prepared for this, though.

It was easy to give me up.

It wouldn’t even be the first time this week that it had happened.

After a moment where everyone seemed frozen in place, Diane got up so fast her chair tipped over. She made it across the room quickly, and her arms were around me in the next second. For once, I welcomed them. “No way, baby. How could you think that?” she asked fiercely as I came undone, the pressure and sorrow bubbling up and leaking around my welded defenses.

My hands shook as she clutched at them. She tilted my chin up and looked down at me. “You’re mine as long as you want to be. That’s not what this is about. I’m so sorry you thought it was.”

I blinked up at her, still absorbing the moment. She’d said I was hers. “Okay,” I said stupidly.

My social worker righted Diane’s chair. The thick folder sat on the tabletop. Ketzler set a box of tissues on the table. Diane withdrew her arms and took a seat next to me.

Jen put her hand on the folder. “Lela, you’ve been in substitute care for a long time, I know. You’ve been in a lot of different placements. We wanted permanency for you a long time ago, but things never quite worked out …”

Her eyes darted up to Ketzler’s, and the counselor’s hand closed over my shoulder. I clenched my teeth and slowly leaned away. She didn’t take the hint.

Jen cleared her throat. “Anyway, I know you’ve been through a lot, and that you have stability here with Diane. You’ve become one of our success stories. We don’t want to mess that up.”

I glanced over at Diane. “Me neither.” If Diane wasn’t giving me up, were they taking me away from her?

Jen fiddled with her watch long enough for me to want to reach across the table and rip it off her. Her eyes lingered on the folder again, a catalog of all the places I’d been, all the things that had happened to me. All the things she had allowed to happen to me. Maybe that was why she looked so stricken.