She watched him reach out for seconds of the lasagna as he waited for her to gather her thoughts. She frowned. She knew from experience that in his second serving, he’d take too much, wouldn’t be able to finish it and would throw the remaining bites into the trash. She literally had to turn away when he did it. Even the sound of that much food falling heavily into the trash made her wince.

“My day was actually pretty good,” she said after a minute. “I made some progress with that boy Agwe I was telling you about.”

“The Haitian one?”

She nodded. “Yup. He and his dad arrived in Brooklyn about three days before school started. I think it helps our relationship that I’m as new at that school as he is.”

Evan pushed his plate away from him, still half full with lasagna he wouldn’t eat but would claim was too unsanitary to put away now that it had been on his plate and touched by his fork. “What’s wrong then? I can tell something is wrong.”

That drafty feeling whistled through her chest again and Via almost made herself ignore it. But she remembered something that a social worker had once told her. That bad feelings were like monsters in the closet at night. If you got a friend, opened the closet and shined a light in there, the monster would up and disappear, nowhere to be found. The point being that bad feelings often subsided if you told someone about them. It was a tenet that Via had tried to live her life by, and it was a testament to how tumultuous her childhood had been that she could no longer even remember the face of the social worker who’d let her in on that particular secret.

“I... I guess I’ve just been thinking about my foster homes a lot over the last few weeks. Something is reminding me of my experiences there and I’m not sure what.”

“Oh. Really?” Evan cleared his throat and reached for another slice of bread. He had a polite look affixed to his face. The one he always wore when she talked about her experience in the system, or even about her parents. At the beginning, when they’d first been falling in love, she’d sensed his genuine interest in her childhood. But when it had started to become clear that the stories were not very Oliver Twist, he’d sort of stopped asking about it. “Are there any foster kids that you’re working with at school?”

“Two, actually. But I don’t think that’s what...” she trailed off in frustration. She wished she hadn’t brought it up. She felt like she’d walked into a hallway only to find the far door was locked, and now she’d doubled back to find the original door was locked as well. Shine a light on the feeling, she urged herself. “I think it’s just that I’m kind of having this feeling I used to have when I was a kid. And I don’t know why I’m having it.”