She didn’t answer. She just pushed a thick yellow folder across the table toward me. I opened it. There were three prior reports in there. All of them were closed. All of them involved children under the age of five. I looked through the dates. The names were different, but the stories were the same. A bruise here. A fall there. A closed case every single time.

My heart wasn’t just breaking. It was turning into something hard and cold. I looked up at the worker. “Why?” I asked. “Why did you send him back to that?”

She finally looked at me, and her eyes were full of a tired, empty defeat that I will never forget. “The judge who approved the return is her father,” she said.

The silence in that room was louder than any scream. It wasn’t a mistake. It wasn’t a lapse in judgment. It was a system that had been rigged from the start to protect a bloodline instead of a child. I realized then that I hadn’t been fighting a broken system. I had been fighting a machine that was working exactly the way it was designed to.

I left that office and walked out into the bright afternoon sunlight, but it felt like I was still in the dark. I drove home, but I couldn’t bring myself to walk through my front door. I sat in my car for three hours, just watching the wind blow the leaves across the driveway.

I think about that blue cup on my counter every single day. I think about the three hundred and forty dollars I spent to make his life a little bit easier for a few months. I think about the judge sitting in his chambers, probably sipping coffee, while a little boy sat in an ER room with a broken bone and no one to hold his hand.

I am a grandmother. I am a neighbor. I am a foster parent who thought love was enough to fix the cracks in the world. I was wrong. I don’t know where Toby is tonight. I don’t know if his collarbone is healing. I don’t know if he’s scared.

Every time the phone rings, I jump. I expect it to be a police officer or a hospital. I expect to hear that the next fall was the one that finally took him. I walk through my house and see the empty space where his little shoes used to be, and I feel the weight of every single thing I didn’t do. I should have fought harder. I should have called every newspaper in the state. I should have stood on the courthouse steps and shouted until someone listened.