Gloria sighed. It was not an unkind sigh.
"I'm going to be honest with you, because I think you can take it," she said. "Tonight, and for the next few weeks, you can't have her. You're not licensed. You're not kin. You're a widower with a full-time job who found a child in a basement at midnight four hours ago, and I've got a judge to answer to. When she's discharged, she's going to a licensed emergency foster home. I've already got one in mind. Walt and Maureen Brennan, over in Coplay. They're in their sixties. They've fostered something like forty kids. They've got a three-legged dog and a woodstove and Maureen bakes bread every morning. June will be safe there. I'd stake my job on it."
Sam nodded. He had known. Still, it hurt.
"But," Gloria said.
He looked up.
"There's a thing in Pennsylvania called kinship care. It mostly means relatives. But the law also lets us place a child with someone who has a significant, positive relationship with the child or the family. It's not usually somebody who's known her for four hours. But it's also not usually somebody whose eleven-year-old kept her alive for three weeks." She took a card out of her tote bag and handed it to him. "If you're serious, really serious, then you start foster parent training. There's a class starting in January. There's a home study, clearances, fingerprints, a lot of paperwork and a lot of strangers in your house asking personal questions. It takes months. And at the end of it, you might still not get her. Her mother's alive, Mr. Whitley. The goal in a case like this is always reunification, if the parent can get well. You'd be signing up to love a child who might go home. That's the hardest thing there is. Most people can't do it."
Sam turned the card over in his fingers.
"I'm already doing it," he said.
When the sun came up over the Lehigh River, June was asleep in the room with the clouds on the ceiling, with an IV in one arm and Sunshine the bear in the other and the blue moon blanket over her legs. Nora had insisted on bringing it. Nora was asleep in the recliner beside the bed, curled up like a cat. Sam stood in the doorway and watched them both.
At seven, Officer Kowalczyk came by to tell him that Richard Voss had been picked up at a gas station outside Hazleton at four in the morning, driving a car with a broken taillight. He was being held on charges of endangering the welfare of a child, among other things, and on an outstanding warrant from Northampton County. He had told the arresting officers that the kid ran off on her own and it wasn't his problem.
"He'll find out it's his problem," Dana said grimly. Then she looked through the doorway at the two sleeping girls, and her face softened. "How's she doing?"