text: Her happy feeling didn’t last. And not just because of the predictable difficulties of getting back together after having been apart for so long. During her conversations with her mother, Andrea made two discoveries. She learned that Tina had answered the letters she’d sent her—but no one had let her read them. And she discovered her older brother had died in a car accident two years before and no one had told her or allowed her to go to his funeral.
  "That’s what led to my anger," she tells me. "That’s when I got charged with assault with a weapon on the social worker."