The report was a lie. The system took her anyway.
The apartment was clean. The mother was sober. The report was a lie. The system took her daughter anyway.
Four-year-old Alma Varela has a braid her mother plaits every morning, a wall of crayon drawings, and a gray stuffed rabbit she carries from room to room. DCFS caseworker Nadia Cole has stood in enough homes to know this one is not in trouble. The abuse report is false, and Nadia can prove it.
She proves it too late. By the time the anonymous caller is exposed as a landlord who wants the building empty, Alma is already gone, and the rabbit is on the floor where no one thinks to pick it up. She lands in a foster home rated excellent by a private agency that grades its own work. The house is spotless. The nightlight comes off the wall at night. Within weeks, the drawings stop. The talking stops.
Nadia knows what she is looking at. Proving it means breaking every rule she has followed, and facing the one thing she has never told anyone about herself.
A visceral, propulsive thriller about the machinery of child protection and the people it grinds down in the name of safety.
