The doorbell rang on a Sunday afternoon while I was washing dishes.

I almost didn’t answer it. On Sundays, it’s usually somebody selling something. Solar panels. Gutter cleaning. A young man with a clipboard who wants to talk to me about my eternal soul.

I dried my hands on the dish towel and opened the door.

A young woman was standing on our porch.

She was in her mid-twenties, with dark hair pulled back in a low ponytail and a gray wool coat buttoned all the way up to her chin. She was holding her hands in front of her, one gripping the other, the way people do when they’ve practiced what they’re going to say and can’t remember any of it.

“Can I help you?” I said.

She smiled nervously.

“Hi, Margaret,” she said.

Something about her eyes made my breath catch. Big brown eyes, set a little too wide apart. Eyes that looked like they were waiting to be told to leave.

“Do I know you?” I said.

“I hope so,” she said.

And then she gave me a smile I’d seen ten thousand times. A crooked smile. The left side going up higher than the right. A smile that used to show up over a bowl of vegetables she refused to eat.

The dish towel fell out of my hand.

“Ivy?” I whispered.

To understand why I couldn’t breathe on my own front porch, you have to know who Ivy was to me.

And to understand that, you have to know who I was before her.

I used to believe there wasn’t a single problem in the world that couldn’t be made easier with music.

I grew up in a small town in Ohio, the youngest of four girls. My mother played the piano at our church. My father couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket, but he’d dance with her in the kitchen every Saturday night while the radio played. Big band music. Glenn Miller. Benny Goodman. My sisters and I would sit on the stairs in our nightgowns and watch them through the doorway.

My mother said I was dancing before I was walking. She said I’d hold on to the edge of the coffee table and bounce up and down whenever she played.

I took my first ballet class when I was five. My first jazz class at eight. By fourteen, I was taking the bus forty-five minutes each way, three times a week, to a real studio in Columbus.

At twenty-three, I was winning competitions. Regional, then national. Ballroom and contemporary. My partner was a lanky, sweet boy named Theo who could lift me over his head like I weighed nothing and couldn’t remember a single person’s birthday.

At thirty, I was performing professionally. A touring company. Six months a year on the road. Theaters in Chicago, Atlanta, Denver. Once, for three glorious weeks, a stage in New York.

By thirty-two, it was over.

It happened during a rehearsal in Pittsburgh. A simple jump. One I’d done a thousand times. I came down wrong. My left knee went one direction, and the rest of me went the other.

I heard it before I felt it. A sound like a wet branch snapping.

Then I felt it.

Two surgeries. A year of physical therapy. A doctor in a white coat sitting on a rolling stool, looking at my X-rays on a lighted board and shaking his head very gently.

“You’ll walk normally,” he said. “You’ll be able to dance at weddings. But Mrs. Burke, I’m sorry. You won’t perform again. Not like you did. The knee won’t take it.”

I went home and lay on the couch for three weeks.

I didn’t play any music. I didn’t open the curtains.

My husband, Daniel, came home from work every evening and sat on the edge of the couch and put his hand on my ankle. The good ankle. He didn’t say much. He’s not a talker. He’s an accountant. He likes numbers because they don’t argue with you.

At the end of the third week, he sat down on the coffee table across from me.

“You could teach,” he said.

“Teach what?” I said. “How to fall gracefully?”

“How to get back up,” he said.

I hated him for saying it.

Then I thought about it for a week.

Then I loved him for saying it.

So I opened a dance studio.

It was a narrow storefront on Main Street, between a shoe repair shop and a bakery that made the best cinnamon rolls in the county. The landlord gave me a deal because nobody else wanted it. It had been a pawn shop. It still smelled a little like old cigarettes and furniture polish.

Daniel and I put in the mirrors ourselves. We laid the wooden floor over a weekend, on our knees, with our friends. We installed the barres along the walls. I painted the sign out front myself. Burke Dance Studio. In blue letters, slightly crooked.

The first month, I had nine students.

By the end of the first year, I had sixty.

By the fifth year, I had over two hundred. Little girls in pink tights. Teenagers who wanted to learn hip-hop. Middle-aged women who’d always wanted to try tap. A seventy-eight-year-old retired mailman named Gus who took ballroom every Tuesday because his late wife had always wanted him to, and he’d never gotten around to it.

For years, I loved every single minute.

But dancing wasn’t my only love.

I’d always adored children. Always. Since I was a little girl myself. I was the one who babysat for every family on our street. I was the one who held the babies at church while their mothers sang in the choir.

I’d dreamed my whole life of having one of my own.

Daniel and I started trying when I was thirty-three. A year after the knee. We thought it would be easy. Everyone in my family got pregnant easily. My sister Carol got pregnant on her honeymoon.

It wasn’t easy.

It was a year. Then two. Then doctors. Then tests. Then shots in my stomach every morning that left little bruises like purple fingerprints. Then a procedure. Then another procedure.

Then a doctor sitting across from us in a small office with a box of tissues on the table.

I won’t tell you everything about those years. Some things belong just to Daniel and me.

But I’ll tell you that by the time I was thirty-nine, we’d stopped talking about it. Not because we’d given up. Because talking about it hurt too much.

We’d walk past the baby aisle at the grocery store without looking. We’d go to baby showers and smile and bring presents and come home and not say anything to each other in the car.

There was a little bedroom upstairs in our house, across the hall from ours. We’d painted it pale yellow when we first moved in. For a nursery, someday.

By the time I was thirty-nine, the door to that room stayed closed.

Then, one evening in October, Daniel took my hand at the kitchen table.

We’d just finished dinner. Pot roast. The dishes were still on the table. There was music playing on the radio, very low, because there was always music playing in our house.

“What if we became foster parents?” he said.

I looked at him.

“After everything we’ve been through?” I said. “Daniel, I can’t. I can’t love a child and then have to give it back. I can’t do that.”

He held my hand a little tighter.

“We still have a home, Maggie,” he said. “And we still have love to give. All that love. It’s just sitting there. In that yellow room. Behind that closed door.”

I didn’t say anything for a long time.

The radio was playing an old Glenn Miller song. Moonlight Serenade. My parents’ song. The one they used to dance to in the kitchen on Saturday nights.

“Okay,” I said finally. “Okay. Let’s find out.”

The classes took eight weeks. Every Tuesday and Thursday night in a church basement across town, with eleven other couples and a woman named Joanne Pruitt from the county who wore enormous glasses and spoke very fast.

She told us about trauma. About attachment. About what kids who’ve been moved around a lot might do when they come into a new house. Hide food. Refuse to unpack. Test you, to see if you’ll send them away.

“These children have learned that grown-ups leave,” Joanne said. “Your job is to not leave. Even when they push you. Especially when they push you.”

She told us one more thing, on the last night. She looked right at me when she said it.

“And you have to remember,” she said, “that the goal of foster care is reunification. With family, if possible. You might love a child with your whole heart, and still have to let them go. If you can’t accept that, this isn’t for you.”

I nodded.

I thought I accepted it.

I didn’t know anything.

Three months later, on a cold Tuesday afternoon in February, a little girl arrived at our doorstep.

Joanne Pruitt brought her. They stood together on our porch in the gray afternoon light.

Ivy was eight years old.

She was small for eight. Thin. She had dark hair cut short and uneven, like someone had done it with kitchen scissors. She was wearing a pink coat that was two sizes too big, with the sleeves rolled up three times.

She was carrying a blue duffel bag with a broken zipper. And a plastic grocery bag, from a Kroger, full of clothes.

That was everything she owned.

I knelt down on the porch so we’d be the same height.

“Hello, sweetheart,” I said. “I’m Margaret.”

She looked at me. She didn’t smile.

“Hello,” she said.

Her voice was very quiet. Very polite.

“This is Daniel,” I said. Daniel was standing behind me in the doorway. He waved at her. A small wave. Like he was afraid of scaring a bird.

Ivy looked at him. She didn’t wave back.

“Would you like to see your room?” I asked.

She nodded.

We took her upstairs. To the yellow room.

We’d opened the door for the first time in years. We’d cleaned it. We’d bought a white bed with a purple quilt and a little desk and a lamp shaped like a moon. I’d put a stuffed rabbit on the pillow. Daniel had put a box of crayons and a pad of drawing paper on the desk.

Ivy stood in the doorway and looked at it for a long time.

She didn’t go in.

“Am I allowed to sleep in that bed?” she asked.

“Of course,” I said. “It’s yours.”

She looked up at me.

“For how long?” she asked.

I looked at Daniel. Daniel looked at me.

What do you say to that? To an eight-year-old who asks how long before she’ll even step into her own bedroom?

“For as long as you’re here, honey,” I said.

Ivy nodded slowly. Like that was the answer she’d expected.

She walked into the room. She put the blue duffel bag down on the floor next to the bed. She put the grocery bag next to it.

She didn’t unpack.

During those first weeks, Ivy asked permission for everything.

Everything.

“Can I open the refrigerator?”

“Of course, sweetheart.”

“Can I sit on the couch?”

“Absolutely.”

“Can I use the bathroom?”

“You never have to ask that, honey. Never.”

“Can I have a glass of water?”

“Ivy, you can have whatever you want. This is your house now.”

She’d look at me when I said things like that. A long, careful look. Like she was trying to figure out what the trick was.

She ate everything on her plate. Every single bite. Even the things I could tell she didn’t like. She ate fast, with her arm curled around her plate, like someone might take it away.

One night, Daniel found a dinner roll hidden under her pillow. And a granola bar in her sock drawer. And three packets of crackers in the pocket of her pink coat.

He came into our bedroom holding them in his hands. He didn’t say anything. He just put them on the bed.

I sat there and looked at those crackers for a long time.

Joanne had told us about this. Hiding food. Kids who don’t know if there’ll be food tomorrow.

Hearing about it in a church basement was different.

The next morning, I put a basket on the kitchen counter. I filled it with granola bars and crackers and apples and little bags of pretzels.

“This is your basket,” I told Ivy. “Anything in it is yours. Whenever you want. You don’t have to ask. And when it gets empty, I’ll fill it up again. Every time.”

She looked at the basket for a long time.

She didn’t take anything that day.

But the next morning, two granola bars were missing.

The morning after that, three.

A week later, Daniel stopped finding food under her pillow.