If you read Part One, you already saw me standing on the porch with the trash bag and the sirens, a seven-year-old “success story” in a house full of relapse and broken promises. This is what happened after the police turned off their lights and drove away, after the neighbors closed their blinds and pretended everything was normal again.
They handed me another trash bag.
Not because I had so much stuff, but because that is the official luggage of children nobody listened to. The officer tried to smile at me, like I was a lost puppy he’d just found on the highway. The caseworker kept saying my name in that soft, fake voice adults use when they know they messed up.
“Buddy, we’re going to find you a safe place,” she said.
She didn’t say, “I’m sorry I sent you back here.” She didn’t say, “Sarah was right and I was wrong.” She just asked me to pick which toys to take while my father shouted in the kitchen and my mother sobbed and swore she could explain everything.
I picked my teddy bear.
Two shirts.
One pair of jeans.
The socks that didn’t have holes. Seven-year-olds learn quickly which things can survive another move and which things can’t. I looked at the little race car Sarah had given me for my sixth birthday and left it on the windowsill. I didn’t want my father to see it and get mad all over again.
On the way out, I asked the question again.
“Can I go to Sarah’s?”
The caseworker didn’t look at me. She looked at the officer, then at the paperwork. Paperwork always wins.
“That placement is… complicated right now,” she said. “We’re working on it.”
Complicated. That’s the word adults use when they mean, “We’re punishing the grown-up who protected you, and you’re collateral damage.”
We drove for a long time.
The car smelled like coffee and fast food and the kind of tired that lives in a person’s bones.
The highway lights blurred into streaks outside my window. Every time another car passed, I imagined it was Sarah’s little blue SUV, that she would pull up beside us and honk and shout, “Follow me. He’s coming home.”
Nobody came.
Just the hum of the tires and the quiet radio and my own heartbeat pounding in my ears.
We didn’t go to a house. We went to a building.
“Emergency shelter,” the caseworker said, like it was a magic word. To me it looked like a school and a jail had a baby. Metal doors. Buzzers. Posters on the walls that said things like “You Matter” and “Choose Kindness” in bright letters that didn’t match the feeling in the air.
They took my trash bag and wrote my name on a plastic bin. They gave me a plastic mattress with a paper-thin sheet.
There were three other boys in the room, all different ages, all with the same look in their eyes: older than their years, younger than their pain.
“New kid,” one of them said, not unkindly. “What’d you do?”
It took me a second to realize what he meant. In this place, the assumption is always that the kid messed up, not the adults.
“I… I didn’t do anything,” I whispered. “My dad… the police…”
He nodded like he’d heard this one before.
“Doesn’t matter,” he said. “They still move you. That’s what they do.”
That night, I tried not to cry. Crying in a room full of strangers is dangerous. So I cried inside my head. I pressed my face into the pillow and talked to Sarah in my mind.
I told her about the sirens.
I told her about the trash bag.
I told her I was sorry I hadn’t fought harder, even though fighting harder would have just gotten me hurt.
In the morning, a different caseworker came. Younger. Tired in a newer way.
She had a clipboard too, but she actually looked at me more than she looked at the paper. That alone felt like a miracle.
“Hey, I’m Jenna,” she said, crouching so we were eye-level. “I read your file.”
“All of it?” I asked.
“Enough of it to be angry,” she answered quietly.
She didn’t say at who. She didn’t have to.
“I asked for Sarah,” I told her. “Again.”
“I know,” she said. “I saw the notes.”
There it was, in black ink on white paper somewhere: The kid keeps asking for previous foster parent, Sarah. That’s all they ever put. They never write the important part, like: He begged. He clung. He knew.
“Can I go back to her now?”
Jenna hesitated. Her eyes did the thing adults’ eyes do when their heart wants one thing and their job says another.
“There’s a review hearing in a few weeks,” she said. “I can raise the possibility.”
Possibility. Another grown-up word that means maybe, probably not, don’t get your hopes up kid.
At night, in the shelter, we told each other stories.
One boy had been in nine homes. Another had a scar on his arm shaped like a cigarette burn and called it his “souvenir.” We joked sometimes, because if you don’t joke, you fall apart.
But in the quiet moments, when the lights were off and the staff’s footsteps faded down the hall, the truth came out.
“Do you think anyone’s fighting for us?” one of them asked into the dark.
I thought of Sarah, standing in the courtroom that day, voice shaking but steady, saying, “He isn’t ready. It’s not safe.” I thought of how red the Judge’s face got, how stiff the Caseworker’s shoulders were.
“Yeah,” I said finally. “But I think they get punished for it.”
I didn’t know then that she was still calling. Still emailing. Still leaving messages.
I didn’t know she had a file too—one where her name was underlined with words like “emotional,” “challenging,” and “overly attached.” The system doesn’t like people who make noise, even when the noise is a warning siren.
Years passed. I won’t walk you through every move, every new school, every “fresh start” that smelled like someone else’s old pillow.
Just know that trash bags became normal. That I stopped unpacking all the way. That I learned to keep my favorite things small enough to carry quickly.
But I never forgot Sarah.
And she never forgot me.
I found out later—when I was fourteen and finally old enough to read some of my own records—that she had filed appeals, written letters, even sat in waiting rooms for hours hoping to talk to someone with authority.
Most of those letters never made it into my official file. They lived in someone’s inbox, in someone’s shredder, in the space of “We’re too busy” and “This is how it’s always done.”
