‘Will I be here forever?’

In our cozy guest room, I tucked the quilt around the 9-year-old boy I had just met. He looked up at me frightened, his blue eyes wide, a spattering of freckles across his nose.

“Will I be here forever?”

It was only hours after the social worker dropped him off at our house near Hampden, clear across Baltimore from his own home and everyone he knew.

My gut told me I needed to be as honest as possible. He was on his best behavior, claiming he wanted only vegetables and water for dinner. He didn’t really know what foster care was, or why he was taken away from his dad. He did know that several young relatives left for the system years ago and never came home.

Remembering an idea that once com- forted me, I took him to the window and showed him the night sky. “I don’t know how long you’ll be here,” I told him. But I said his mother and father could see the same moon and the same stars.

This child wanted nothing more than to go home, while I yearned to have a child of my own. I wanted to protect him, and his younger brother, a toddler who had been placed with my husband and me the day before.

I knew next to nothing about the boys, their family or why they came into foster care. It was the spring of 2016. After being married for nearly 10 years, and struggling with infertility, my husband, Artie Nordstrom, and I were newly certified foster parents. We hoped to do some good and longed for the chance to adopt a child or two, if we were really lucky.