Chapter 2

The kitchen visit was scheduled for four o'clock. Mr. Bledsoe arrived at eleven minutes to four, which was exactly the kind of punctuality that made Nadia trust him and simultaneously distrust everyone else in the system that had put his folder on her table.

He was short and square, built like a man who had spent thirty years carrying stacks of paper through government buildings, with a balding grey head and deep brown skin that creased around his eyes when he smiled. Today he did not smile. Today he stood in the doorway of Nadia's kitchen, reading glasses on a cord around his neck, a grey cardigan buttoned over a white collared shirt, and he looked at the thin red line on Nadia's cheekbone for a long moment before he said anything at all.

"That from today?"

"School pickup," Nadia said. She gestured to the chair across from her at the kitchen table. "You want coffee?"

"What I want is to read the file," he said, but he pulled out the chair, sat down, and set his folder flat on the scored wooden surface. He did not open it. His hands rested on top of it, thick fingers splayed on the manila cover.

Melia was on the couch in the next room, visible through the doorway. She had her backpack open on her lap, a colored pencil in her hand, a drawing taking shape on a sheet of school paper. She had not looked up when the doorbell rang.

Mr. Bledsoe did not ask if she might want to go to her room. That was one of the things Nadia appreciated about him, the way he understood that Melia would want to be able to see the table and the people at it. Control, for a silent child, came from knowing where everyone was and what they were doing. He had learned that in his twenty years of kitchen visits.

"Corinne Rell filed a report this morning," Mr. Bledsoe said. His voice was level, unhurried, a man reading from a script he had read a hundred times before. "Says you missed the last two Fridays. Says you have a routine violation on page two of the case plan. Says she has documentation."

Nadia sat down across from him. She folded her hands on the table. The tote sat on the floor beside her chair, within reach.

"I never missed one," she said.

"I didn't say you did." He opened the folder. Inside it, the papers were clipped and ordered, the top sheet a form with a case number and a date stamp. Mr. Bledsoe set it aside. "But I have to follow the procedure. Procedure says I log a complaint, I read the file, I make a determination. If the determination is that there was a violation, then the court reduces your visits to alternate weekends. You know this."