Eight months had passed, but it hardly felt like half a year to Erica. She sat at the kitchen table late one morning, stacks of adoption papers and police reports spread around her like a shroud of secrets. A single lamp cast long shadows on the walls as Erica muttered to herself, clutching a pen between trembling fingers.

“Where do you come from, child?” She whispered to the unopened file in front of her.

Her eyes darted across the paperwork again, and again. The sparse medical report, ...