Chapter 12

Sandra Reeves arrived at nine-fifteen with a sensible sedan and a careful expression and Katie McDonnell in the passenger seat with a duffel bag at her feet and a backpack on her lap and the silver herringbone choker at her throat catching the winter morning light.

She had slept in it. Had lain in her room at the foster house for the last time with her hand pressed flat against the pendant and thought about the ceremony and the kiss and the word forever until sleep finally came. Had woken up with it still warm against her skin and felt, for the first time in as long as she could remember, that the day ahead was something to move toward rather than through.

Sandra had noticed it when Katie came downstairs with her bags. Had looked at the choker for a moment with those perceptive eyes and said nothing. She was good at saying nothing when nothing was the right thing.

She was also good at reading rooms.

She read this one the moment Yoko opened the front door.

Yoko Tanaka stood in her doorway on a January morning and looked at the girl on her front steps — copper hair, pale skin, green eyes, that collar at her throat — and something in her face did what it had been slowly learning to do since September. It opened.

“Katie,” she said. Simply. Warmly. Like a word she’d been waiting to say in this specific context.

“Hi,” Katie said. Her voice was doing the thing. The rough edges. She cleared her throat. “Hi, Yoko.”

Yoko stepped back and held the door wide.

Sandra carried the conversation through the entry — forms, signatures, the practical transfer of a child from one home to another, the language of the system doing its careful work. She sat at the kitchen table with Yoko and went through the remaining paperwork with the thoroughness of someone who took her job seriously and the warmth of someone who had been hoping for exactly this outcome for fourteen months.

Komiko was at the kitchen doorway. Katie stood beside her — half a step behind and to her right, that position, the only position that felt like home — and they watched the adults complete the official machinery of what was already real.

At one point Sandra looked up and her eyes moved between the two girls. Rested briefly on the collar. Moved to Komiko’s face and found there the quiet certainty she’d been seeing in this particular fourteen year old since the first home study visit.