Her time in foster care was quite traumatic and abusive; Brennan indicated that she was once locked in the trunk of a car for two days because she broke a plate, and in the episode "The Finger in the Nest", she reveals to Booth that she walked into her elderly neighbor's house to find the woman dead. In the same episode, she also mentions to Booth that her parents were very concerned about her afterward, because she started faking her own death. In Season 2, she mentions that during her time in the foster care system, she kept a list of foster homes she had been kicked out of on the bottom of her shoe.