wide, hollow eyes. They were huddled together on a plastic bench, a tangled knot of small limbs and mismatched socks. They were the casualties of a broken system, waiting for the gavel to fall and dictate the rest of their lives. To the state, they were files to be closed; to Carter, they were a family on the brink of extinction.
The official term for what was about to happen was ‘placement allocation.’ It was a sterile, bureaucratic phrase designed to mask the jagged reality of the situation. In less
