It turned out there was an emergency foster placement because Sarah tried to fight the social worker. Three weeks went by, and I didn’t hear a single word from Sarah. I was worried sick, just sitting by my phone waiting for some kind of news.

Then, around midnight on a Tuesday, my phone finally rang. It was Sarah, and she was screaming so loud I had to hold the phone away from my ear.

“My kids are in a stranger’s house because of you,” she sobbed. “Mia wet the bed last night for the first time in four years.”

I tried to calm her down, but she just kept going. She told me the foster home had six other kids packed into three bedrooms. There was only one bathroom for all of them, and the foster father smoked cigarettes right inside the house.

“You did this,” Sarah screamed before she hung up on me.

I sat there in the dark, and my brain just kind of stopped working for a second. I had saved those poor sweet babies from a man who yelled. But in doing so, I had put them somewhere so much worse.

The next four months were a total nightmare. Greg had to complete an anger management program, and Sarah had to take parenting classes to get the kids back. Every single day, I prayed that the kids were okay, but deep down, I knew they weren’t.

Eventually, the judge ordered the kids to be returned home. I saw their car pull into the driveway from my front window, and my heart just did a strange flip. I waited a few days, and then I walked down the street to try to apologize.

Sarah opened the door just a crack. She didn’t let me inside, but Mia was standing right behind her in the hallway.

The sweet little girl who used to run into my arms didn’t even smile.

She just looked up at me with these cold, empty eyes. “Why did you send us away?” she asked.

I didn’t even know what to say. I just stood there on the porch while Sarah slammed the door in my face. That was the last time they ever spoke to me, and that was when the broken bracelet showed up in my mailbox.

Everyone in my life tells me I did the right thing. My sister says I saved those kids from emotional abuse, and that I shouldn’t feel guilty. But they don’t know the whole story.

A friend of mine works in the administrative office for the county, and she managed to look at the confidential case file for me. She wanted to reassure me that the state did a thorough investigation.

Instead, she found the notes from the caseworker’s final interview with Mia before she was returned home.