“That one.”

“He loses them twice,” she said.

“You always forget the second time.”

“I will try to keep up.”

She gave me a small smile, then looked down at the blanket again.

“Daddy, if somebody did not want me, why did you?”

I had answered hard questions at work, signed papers I barely understood, and spent four years repeating the account my parents had given me about Renata’s adoption.

None of that helped me answer a four-year-old who had been told she might be unwanted.