"What you built," Dax said, and his voice stayed level — the thing he had learned from Remi, the specific quality that was more devastating than volume because it required the other person to sit inside the words without the noise of anger to distract them from their weight — "cost a woman her child for twenty-two years. It cost fourteen placements in fourteen different homes before a guardian took her in at sixteen. It cost two hundred and fourteen letters written to an address given by the person you put in place — written into a silence that was engineered. It cost a woman named Ingrid Calloway her practice and her city, because she was told that sensible women understand when something isn't about them." He paused. "And it nearly cost a child the right to exist as who she actually is."
