I only knew that I could not make myself walk out that door.

I have wondered, in the years since, what exactly held me in that hard plastic chair for forty minutes, when every practical instinct I had was telling me to go home.

And I think the truest answer is that I had spent nine years running from connection, from need, from anything that could reach me, and some part of me was profoundly tired of running.

Some part of me, worn down by a decade of careful emptiness, had heard Greg describe a child who had been refused nineteen times and had thought, with a quiet desperate clarity that surprised me: I know what that is.