CHAPTER FIVE — SECOND LANTERN

I called Second Lantern from my office on Monday morning.
I worked as a scheduling coordinator at a neighborhood dental clinic, and my desk faced a wall of colorful appointment cards.
Usually the wall made me feel capable of arranging any difficult week.
That morning every calendar square seemed like another place something could go wrong.
Roland Pierce recognized my name immediately.
He had already spoken with Nia and apologized for sending us the brochure.
I told him the brochure on our porch was not the one his office had mailed.
He went silent.
“We haven’t mailed anything,” he said.
“We use email for introductory materials.”
I described the handwritten warning.
“Then someone delivered that independently,” he said.
I asked why Second Lantern had accepted a referral from a woman who was not our caseworker.


Roland explained that the organization offered transportation, temporary accommodation, and family coaching during emergencies, subject to verification.
It did not have authority to place foster children or override county decisions.
“Our first call should have been to the agency,” he admitted.
“I have already changed that procedure.”
I asked whether Paula worked for them.
“She volunteers for our community outreach committee,” he said.
His answer made the room feel smaller.
“What does that committee do?”
“It identifies families who might benefit from support and raises private donations.”
“Does Paula receive money when somebody signs up?”
“No,” Roland said.
He paused.
“But our expansion proposal includes a public demonstration of reunited sibling households.”
I looked at Ellis’s drawing on my phone screen.
“What demonstration?”
“A family gathering next month,” he said.


“It’s meant to show donors why temporary housing matters.”
I asked whether the organization had recruited any children for it.
Roland said participation required appropriate permissions and could not substitute for placement approval.
Then he asked a question of his own.
“Did Paula tell your daughter she could arrange for the siblings to live together?”
“Yes.”
“She was expressly told not to make that claim,” he said.
His voice had lost its professional warmth.
I asked for a meeting with him and our county caseworker.
He agreed without hesitation.
At the clinic, my supervisor Maribel gave me an hour away from the desk.
She did not ask for details after I told her the matter concerned our children.
When I returned, she placed a paper cup of tea beside my keyboard.
“You can be a parent and still need to breathe,” she said.
I nearly cried because it was the first kind thing anyone had said without attaching a warning.
That afternoon Gabriel and I met Nia at a county family services office.
Roland attended by telephone.
He confirmed that Paula had been pursuing a position on the organization’s governing board.
She had proposed a project called Home Together, intended to highlight the emotional value of sibling reunification.
She had also promised to identify a family facing an urgent housing crisis.
“We never approved any family names,” he said.
Nia asked whether Paula had represented herself as having county authority.
Roland described one conversation in which she had implied that her prior experience gave her special access to placement discussions.
“It was wrong of us not to challenge that immediately,” he admitted.
Nia asked him to preserve the communication.
“There are important privacy boundaries here,” she said.
“A private organization doesn’t get to create a crisis and then claim to resolve it.”
Roland agreed.
But he also said there was no evidence his organization had caused the water failures.
We knew that.
The gap between what we suspected and what we could demonstrate was beginning to exhaust us.
At home, Gabriel found a note from the utility confirming that the most recent incident had been referred to its security team.
The note did not identify a person.
The protective enclosure had been checked, and the crew advised us to report any further problem immediately.
Gabriel read the letter twice.
“They’re taking it seriously,” he said.
I looked toward the fence separating our houses.
“So is Paula.”