Chapter 17 — XIMENA

Nick had an aunt.

He had told me, in Alma's kitchen, that his mother's sister lived "in New Mexico somewhere" and that he had not seen her since he was seven.

The county had recorded, in Nick's file, that no relatives were available.

That is a sentence in a file. It is four words. It cost that boy fourteen months in Larkfield House and seven months behind a bakery.

Ximena Vasquez lives in Las Cruces and works for a school district and had been looking for her nephew for three years.

She had called the county in Pennsylvania eleven times.

She had been told, correctly, that she could not be given information about a child in care.

She had filed a request for relative notification in 2023 and had never had a response, and when Odalys pulled the file there was a printed copy of it in the wrong subfolder with a handwritten note on it saying *check w/ provider* and nothing else.

*Check with provider.*

Somebody had asked Larkfield whether Nick Vasquez had a relative who wanted him, and Larkfield had said no, and that had gone in the file as fact, and a bed had stayed full at three hundred and forty dollars a day for four hundred and twenty-six days.

I flew Ximena Vasquez out on the fourteenth of December.

I paid for it. I want to say that plainly rather than leave it implied, and I also want to say that it cost four hundred and ten dollars and is the least significant thing I did in this entire story, and people in this town have thanked me for it about thirty times and have never once thanked me for the filing cabinet.

They met in the arrivals hall at Wilkes-Barre.

She knew him from across the concourse. He was six years older than the last photograph she had and she knew him at forty feet.

He did not run to her. He stood absolutely still and let her come, which is what he does, and she stopped about a foot away and did not touch him and said something in Spanish that I did not understand and have never asked about.

Then he put his forehead on her shoulder.

Kinship placement was approved on the nineteenth of February. Ximena had to be fingerprinted, home-studied, income-verified and inspected, and it took nine weeks and she did every single item without complaining once.

He lives in Las Cruces now.