I have made most of my decisions the ordinary way, weighing and second-guessing and revising.

This was not one of those.

Standing in that hallway, having just told my brother I was adopting my sister’s abandoned daughter, having pushed the folder back across the desk, I felt that rare and total clarity settle over me like something physical, and every doubt I might reasonably have had, about my readiness, my competence, my solitary state, the size of the undertaking, simply had no purchase on it.

They were all real questions.