I drove home from that cafe and I pulled over halfway there, because I could not see the road through my own tears, and I sat in the car and understood that I had already decided — that there was no longer any real question about whether I would adopt this boy, only questions of paperwork and time.

A boy returned ten times who still checked a near-stranger’s cookie for the raisins her dead daughter had hated.

I did not know what the world had been thinking, passing him around for years like something no one wanted.

I only knew that I wanted him, completely, and that I was done pretending the visits were just visits.

Chapter 10 — Do You Really Want This?

Eventually we began to talk, seriously, about the thing neither of us had quite dared to name out loud.