Love was the fuel, but understanding was the map, and you need both, and I am grateful every day that they made me learn the map before they let me near the boy.

And then Gail invited me to a gathering where prospective parents could meet some of the young people in the agency’s care, and everything I thought I was looking for rearranged itself around a boy by a window.

Chapter 6 — The Boy by the Window

Most of the younger children at the gathering were doing what children do in a room full of toys and nervous adults — running, making noise, coloring at low tables, performing their own likability with the desperate instinct of kids who know, on some level, that they are being chosen or not chosen.

It is a terrible thing to watch, if you let yourself really see it — a roomful of children performing their own adoptability, turning up the charm, the cuteness, the good behavior, because some animal instinct has told them that this is an audition and that the ones who audition best go home with someone.