Chapter 373 In Love With Nia:>31

• "She was originally passed off as an orphan from a children's home run by a family we had reason to believe was involved in people trafficking. This home was in Vancouver, but all records of her in Vancouver are missing, probably destroyed in an attempt to disguise the true scale of the operation in Canada. However, a child closely matching her description was legally adopted by a family in San Francisco through an agency in Sacramento connected to, and possibly run by the same family. My colleague in the San Francisco Police Department and his contacts in Children & Family Services have managed to locate the child involved, and are waiting for a judge to rule on whether you can contact her, seeing as you are not the birth parents. As she's over 21 now, there may not be a problem, but I'll have to wait for a ruling and the go-ahead from the District Attorney's office in San Francisco before I can direct you further."
• I got all this second hand, as his English was too fragmentary for me to understand what he was saying, so the body of the story was related to Nia in French, but Canadian 'Quebecois' French dialect, which is a little like a modern English-speaker trying to have a conversation about computers and data processing with an eighteenth century Welsh milkmaid. Nia only spoke modern French, so she spent a certain amount of time screwing up her forehead as she tried to puzzle out what he was saying through the maze of anachronisms and local dialect shifts.
• We got the gist of it, though; Nia was trembling with excitement at the thought of finally getting to meet her sister. I, however was anxious in case some judge in California decided that we had no right or compelling reason to contact this woman who may or may not be Nia's sister. If necessary, we could fly to the Bay Area tomorrow; both Nia and I had multiple-entry visa's from previous trips, I had a B1 and Nia had a B2 holiday visa, so the whole ESTA 72-hour thing didn't apply, otherwise I think Nia would have gone berserk in the US Consulate in Toronto, a place noted for its mind-numbingly long waits and legendary lack of urgency.