I had spent five years being quiet.

I was done.

I want to say something about that clinic, and about what Tiffany actually did, because it is easy to hear the word adoption and imagine something gentle, and there was nothing gentle in it.

Real adoption, done honestly, is one of the most generous things a human being can arrange; I have nothing but respect for the families built that way, and I built one myself, in the end, on the right side of the law.

What Tiffany ran was not that.