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is a while ?”
    “Not important.”
    “I get to decide what’s important and what isn’t.”
    “It was a one-off thing, Violet, okay? Christ. I talked to his foster mother once. Ages ago. I never expected to hear from her again. But she called me a few weeks ago, and— God, Viol, if you think I’m flaky; this woman’s like fucking Joan Baez. And she had this whole thing about how she felt like my calling her in the first place was a harbinger of change, and I—”
    She quickly lost her ability to follow the narrative thread. “Wait, what do you mean—it was a closed adoption; what do you mean foster mother, Wendy, that doesn’t make any sense.”

    “I told you it was a long story.” Wendy’s voice softened, sounded suddenly to contain an amount of compassion similar to that of a normal person.
    Violet sank onto the chaise by the window and closed her eyes. “What happened?”
    “The adoptive parents—died. Car crash. Total freak thing.”
    There was a feeling she experienced when her sons were sick, an internal weakening, sympathetic infirmity. When Wyatt used to cry before preschool, she would too; she felt Eli’s encroaching teeth pressing painfully against her own gums. The feeling originated from a hot mass behind her heart, and she felt the spot pulsing now, thinking of the boy—she still hadn’t asked his name—loving other people, people who loved him back and then one day failed to come home. “How old was he when it happened?”
    “Four.”
    “Christ. So he’s been—”
    “Foster care. Repeatedly. And then a residential place. Lathrop House? Remember there was that kid when we were in grade school who lived there and it used to make Mom so sad?”
    Unable to speak, she nodded. Four.
    “That’s where he met Hanna,” Wendy said. “Mother Earth. The space cadet. She took him in. They actually only live about half a mile from Mom and Dad.”
    “Fuck.”
    “I know; how weird is that? Anyway, he— According to Hanna, it was all just a big bureaucratic clusterfuck. Under normal circumstances he would’ve been adopted by another family in a flash, but he just—wasn’t. Fell through the cracks. He was in a bunch of short-term placements—you know, those, like, child-collecting people who do it for the stipend?—but nothing terrible, Hanna said. She said he’s been lucky, relatively, and I don’t even want to think about what the fuck that means. Then he ended up at Lathrop House, and he and Hanna hit it off, and he’s been with them for about six months. Hanna says he’s so quiet it’s easy to forget he’s around, which is pretty much true, from what I can tell.”
    “Jesus Christ.” She tried to picture Wyatt being ferried through the system like that, tried to envision either of her kids experiencing anywhere near that kind of instability. This is going to open doors you don’t want opened, Violet, Matt had said to her this morning.

    “It’s shitty, but he seems like a nice kid,” Wendy said. “Strangely well adjusted.”
    “What’s his—”
    “His name!” Her sister laughed, an organic startling laugh. “Shit, sorry. Jonah. Bendt, unfortunately; like, cool, why not just cement the kid’s fate as a pipefitter?”
    Jonah. She felt the syllables with her lips. Not the name she would’ve chosen, but she hadn’t allowed herself to entertain the thought at the time, so no name would’ve been. She tried to fit the name to the face in profile she’d seen at the restaurant, to the ethereal mass she saw on the only ultrasound she ever allowed herself to look at.
    This wasn’t supposed to be happening. There was not a single element of this that was supposed to appear again in the life she’d worked so hard to build; not a single molecule of this road not taken—though of course she thought of him, sometimes, weekly at least—was ever supposed to find its way back to her, especially now, when her husband had made partner and she had made continual strides among