The project is called My Families.
It is a poster board with four photographs. A beach, with three of us. A young man in a fireman’s coat. A yellow blanket, which Mr. Amory had tracked down in a box at the fire station, and which was now in a plastic bag on a school table. And in the center, glued down, a newspaper clipping in two pieces, with a thin strip of white between them, so that you could see where it had been cut.
Wynne stood in front of twenty-two classmates and said the sentence she had been practicing in the car.
“I have a family I was born with, and a family I live with. They’re both mine. And my grandmother lives eleven miles away and she’s coming on Saturday.”
A boy in a dinosaur shirt put up his hand.
“Can I come to Saturday?” he asked.
“No,” said Wynne. “But you can come to the next one.”
The county reviewed all pending records. I am told that Constanza Ng’s audit, which took her four months and for which she was personally thanked by a state senator, found nine more entries where one living person had been confused with one deceased, and four children whose adoptions had been finalized on the basis of a record that said no living relatives. They were all contacted. Three of the four now have grandparents at their birthday parties.
