Chapter 1 — The Twentieth

I met Greg at a diner on Route 9 after almost a decade of not seeing each other, and over bad coffee in a corner booth, he told me the thing that would change the entire course of my life, though neither of us knew it at the time.

He told me that he and his wife had been the twentieth family to refuse a baby girl.

“Twentieth,” he said, and he said it in a strange voice, half apology and half wonder.

“They even told us that.

As if it was supposed to be reassurance.

As if hearing that nineteen other families had already said no would make our no easier to carry.” He turned his coffee cup a slow half-turn on the table and did not look up at me.

“No to what?” I asked.

I did not understand yet what he was telling me.

I thought it was a story about a difficult decision he had made, the kind of thing an old friend confesses over coffee when he has been carrying it too long.

I did not know that it was, without either of us intending it, an invitation.

I did not know that somewhere fourteen months into a life that had already been turned away nineteen times, a child was waiting for someone to say yes, and that I was about to become that someone, and that she would turn out to be far more mine than either of us could possibly have guessed sitting in that booth on Route 9.

I have thought often about the strange machinery of it, the sheer improbable chain of small events that had to line up for me to be in that diner at all.

If Greg and I had not lost touch a decade earlier, we would not have been catching up.

If we had caught up a month sooner, he would not yet have had the story to tell.

If his own family had said yes, there would have been no story at all.

A hundred small hinges, any one of which could have swung the other way and left a little girl in Colfax waiting for a twenty-first family, and a lonely man in Austin never knowing she existed.

I am not a superstitious person.