I had answered it, during those years, with a shrug: my life was for nothing in particular, for quiet, for the absence of pain, for getting through.

And now a fourteen-month-old with her fist in my collar was proposing a different answer, without saying a word, simply by trusting me.

She was proposing that a life might be for someone.

That the point was not to protect yourself from need but to find someone worth being needed by.

I had spent nine years believing the first thing.

In the space of about ten minutes in a county hallway, holding a child who would not stop looking at me, I came all the way over to the second, and I have never once looked back.