Chapter 4: Difficult Child

On Thursday, Maisie refused to come into the visitation room.

Grant could see her through the glass panel in the corridor door. She stood beside Ms. Alvarez with Captain pressed against her coat. When she noticed Grant, she turned her face to the wall.

"She doesn't have to visit," Ms. Alvarez said. "I won't make her."

"I wouldn't ask you to."

Grant set the book of horse drawings he'd brought on the table. Gifts needed approval; he had obtained it that morning. He took it back and handed it to Ms. Alvarez.

"Would you ask if she'd like this? She can keep it even if she doesn't see me."

Ms. Alvarez went into the corridor. Grant could hear only fragments: "No conditions" and Maisie's small, furious "He'll get tired." After a few minutes Ms. Alvarez returned alone.

"She's going back to the activity room. She took the book."

"Did something happen?"

"She learned you've requested information about her past placements. She thinks you were checking whether she's difficult."

Grant had requested the records because Diane had warned him about Maisie's behavior. He had not considered how the request might sound to the child whose behavior everyone discussed.

"May I write her a note?"

Ms. Alvarez gave him paper. He wrote: I asked because I want to understand what people decided about you. You don't owe me a visit. I'll ask to come next Thursday. He signed his name and left before Maisie could feel obliged to answer.

At Tessa's office, a folder of placement summaries waited on the table. Grant read phrases that grew harsher with each page: unwilling to bond, attention seeking, aggressive toward caregivers. One incident involved a broken lamp. Another described Maisie refusing to eat dinner. A third said she'd hidden food in a pillowcase.

"How old was she when the lamp broke?"

"Six," Tessa said.

"And the food?"

"Seven."

Grant turned the page. The file quoted Diane describing those incidents as evidence of a persistent pattern. Later facilities had copied the description into their own intake notes. The words traveled farther than the events themselves.

"Who actually saw the lamp break?"

"The report doesn't say."

"Then we ask."

Tessa had already requested the facilities' original incident notes, but she let him work through the distinction. He made two columns on a legal pad: what someone witnessed and what someone concluded. By the end of the folder, the first column was almost empty.

Tessa laid the two versions of the lamp incident side by side. One named a broken shade; the other said Maisie had thrown the lamp at a caregiver. Grant underlined thrown, then checked the original again. He had learned at work that a shipping error could become a story about a dishonest driver if nobody checked the first scan. Here the mistake followed a child from home to home.

"Can we correct the summaries?" he asked.

"We can request corrections and attach the original records," Tessa said. "First we establish which facilities relied on them."

Grant wrote down their names. He could not undo the doors the words had already closed, but he could stop the next person from reading them unchallenged.

A message came from Grant's operations director. A distribution contract needed his signature by five. He replied that he'd review it at six and stayed.

"The box inventory has a chain of custody?" he asked.

"A partial one. Diane signed when Anna's effects were released. We're still waiting for the underlying receipt for the box."

"Could Maisie have been told it was lost?"

"She could have been told any number of things. We won't assume which."

The next morning Grant drove to his former office building. A printing company occupied the ground floor now. Its manager let him look at the old security desk after he explained he was trying to establish where visitors would have gone years earlier.

The entrance listed in the file belonged to a loading bay on the opposite side of the block. Visitors had never checked in there. Grant photographed the exterior signage and sent it to Tessa along with the lease showing when Whitaker Logistics had moved. Neither proved a deliberate lie, but the claimed visit was growing harder to explain.

On Monday, Ms. Alvarez called. Maisie had asked whether he still wanted Thursday at four.

"Yes," Grant said. "Even if she decides not to come in."

"I told her you'd said that."

"Thank you."

Thursday arrived. Maisie entered the room, put Captain between them, and opened the book to a drawing of a horse standing knee-deep in water.

"You asked if I broke things," she said.

Grant closed the marker he was holding. "I asked what the reports meant. I should have told you before you heard it from somebody else."

"Diane says I make people mad on purpose."

"Do you?"

Maisie frowned. "Sometimes."

"Me too. I've gotten good at it."

"Then why do you get a company?"

"Because the people who work there tell me when I'm being impossible. And sometimes I listen."

She did not laugh. "The lamp was next to the couch. I bumped it when she pulled my bag away."

Grant wanted to ask who pulled the bag and why. Instead he said, "You can tell Ms. Alvarez that if you want."

"I told Diane. She said I needed to take responsibility."

Maisie turned a page. The horse in the drawing ran through a field.

"You don't have to convince me to sit here," Grant said.

She pointed at the book. "That one looks like it would bite you."

"It absolutely would."

Near the end of the visit, Maisie pushed a folded sheet across the table. She had copied the warning from a placement note she'd seen in an open folder: ATTACHMENT RESISTANT.

"What does it mean?"

Grant read it twice. "It means somebody wrote down their opinion about how you get close to people."

"Is it true?"

"I don't know what they were measuring. I know you came back today even though you were angry with me."

Maisie took the paper back and folded it into a smaller square.

That evening Tessa called. The original note from the house where the lamp broke had arrived. It described an accidental fall during an argument over Maisie's overnight bag. No aggression toward anyone was recorded. The later summary called the same incident a violent outburst.

Both pages bore the same recommendation at the bottom, submitted by Diane Voss.