EVAN’S MOTHER was hysterical the day they came for him. The sedatives quieted her as soft-voiced men lowered her to the seedy couch. The boy’s things were packed into a crate, and her drug-fuzzied mind found preoccupation in that for a moment.

Ten years old, and everything he owned fit into a single white box. It didn’t seem possible, but there it was, and two men in dark suits carried the box away between them.

She saw the faces of her neighbors in the open doorway, and she knew they assumed this was an arrest, or just another eviction. It was common. Their feral eyes shuffled through her possessions—the worn couch, her two plastic chairs, the small wooden coffee table with its wobbly leg—scouting for something to grab once the authorities were gone and her things were pushed out into the street.

“I don’t see why he has to leave,” she said. It was a plea.

“It is better for the boy this way,” one of them, a blond woman, said. “We can better nurture his talents if we control the environment. You’ll be able to visit as often as you’d like.”

Evan’s mother wiped the tears from her eyes and struggled unsteadily to her feet. There was no fighting it. A part of her had known that for a while now, since before what happened to Mr. Jacobs, even. Evan was different. It was always going to come to this; the world would take him, one way or the other.

“Can I see it?” she asked.

It was an hour’s drive across the city. In the van, Evan’s mother rocked him until the vehicle finally pulled to rest before a building surrounded by playgrounds. The group filed out. Children shouted and played in the distance while one boy stood gazing up at a flagpole. Evan’s mother stared. That will be Evan, she knew. Strange even here. Odd among the odd.

She bent and kissed her son. “My special boy,” she said, and squeezed him until a female agent tugged at the child’s hand. Evan looked back and waved goodbye.