Free In the Bleak Midwinter by Julia Spencer-Fleming

bookcase, Geoff Burns was staring at an Apache helicopter clock her brother Brian had given her for a gag, and Karen was peering at a photo of Clare in T-shirt and camouflage pants. “Is this… you?” she asked.
    Clare smoothly pushed a mug decorated with a flying rattlesnake and the logo: DEATH FROM THE SKY ! out of sight and poured her coffee into a Virginia Seminary mug instead. “That was me,” she said. “Several years ago.” She sat in a leather chair. “Let’s talk about this idea Chief Van Alstyne had for getting Cody into your foster care.”
    Geoff took the love seat. “Van Alstyne’s idea? When he called me, it sounded like your idea. He made it pretty clear that the only reason he was behind it was to make sure we would let him know if Cody’s mother contacted us.”
    “We were both thinking along the same lines, then.”
    Karen sat down in the other leather chair. “I talked to Chief Van Alstyne, too, and I’ll tell you what I told him. There’s nothing wrong, or illegal, about Geoff and me helping out Cody’s birth mother.”
    “I’m not suggesting there is. You two want Cody. From all we know, the mother—the birth mother—wants you to have Cody. And we all want to ensure that Cody has a good home with loving parents and that the girl who gave birth to him gets whatever help she needs, whether it be medical, or legal, or counseling. It would be an untruth to say we can guarantee a win-win situation—”
    “Of course not!” Geoff interrupted. “What’s to prevent a scatterbrained teenager who put him in a box in the first place from deciding, on a whim, that she wants him back? You’ve never dealt with DHS, Reverend Clare. You have no idea what those people are like. They act as if genetics were sacred destiny. If they get their hands on the birth mother, they’ll do everything in their power to persuade her to hang onto the baby. It doesn’t matter to them if she’s underaged, if she lives in a dump, if she’s going to be a welfare breeder all her life. In their book, providing the egg and sperm for a child is more important than providing him with a good life. I’m sick of it.”
    Clare sat back, blinking.
    “Geoff is so right,” Karen said. “We’ve been up one side and down another with them.” She opened her arms, encompassing herself and her husband. “Just as a logical starting point, wouldn’t you say we were better parent prospects than a girl who would leave a baby out in the cold on the back steps to the church kitchen?”
    Clare nodded. “As a logical starting point. Yes.” She took a sip of her coffee. “Why do you think DHS hasn’t given you Cody to foster at this time?”
    “Because we’ve put up a stink before,” Geoff said. “When they returned that baby girl we told you about to her abusive mother, we went to the press, we took them to court—”
    “It was a nightmare,” Karen said.
    “If you kowtow to DHS, they might throw you a bone now and again, but if you stand up to their fascist bureaucracy and let others know what they’re doing wrong, you get on their enemies’ list.”
    “We knew a couple, the Baldaccis, who ran a home for pregnant teens, a wonderful, caring place. They’d help these girls adopt out or find help for them if they wanted to keep their babies. A few years ago, they fostered a very troubled girl who kept her baby after it was born. She got into trouble later, DHS took the child away, and then, after one of their so-called parental re-education courses, they reunited mother and child. The Baldaccis wrote the caseworker and called her, they sent letters to everyone they knew in DHS warning them that the girl was unstable and the baby would be in danger. Six weeks after what DHS deemed a successful reunification, she murdered the baby.”
    “Oh, my God. How horrible!”
    “Yes, but that’s not the end of it. The Baldaccis were so outraged at this utterly needless death, they went public with the whole story. Despite