I said yes. He said good.

That was five months ago and there has been nothing since, and I look at it about once a week now instead of once a month, and I have stopped promising myself I will stop.

For eleven days, everyone believed a desperate mother had abandoned her child. That’s what I used to say. I said it to Helen and I said it at church and I said it to a reporter from the county paper who wanted the nice version.

She wasn’t leaving her daughter behind. She was bringing her home.

I liked that sentence very much. It was true on a porch in October and it was true in a courthouse corridor and I said it for about a year before I understood the trouble with it.

Home isn’t a house you arrive at. If it were, Sabrina would have been home the moment she stood on my steps in the rain, and she wasn’t — she was in my spare room with a warm bottle she didn’t want, being loved at, for five months.

It took a kitchen table and an envelope and a woman in Bellows Falls and a box with a boy’s name on it and a hundred small corrections, most of them mine.

She didn’t bring Ava home that night. She brought her to a door, and then we did the rest of it, badly and slowly, over eighteen months, and it is still not finished and it will not be.

She was right about one thing, though, and it is the only part of that first night I would not change.

She got to choose the door.

End of Part Two.