She brought out the first forms a few minutes later, the emergency kinship and adoption-intent paperwork, the documents that would begin the long proper process of making official what my heart had already decided in that hallway.

And I signed them, all of them, in under four minutes.

I want to be clear about what those four minutes were and were not, because I have told this story enough times to know how it can be misheard.

Adopting a child is not a four-minute affair, and it should not be; the real process, the one Arthur and I would walk carefully together over the months that followed, involved courts and evaluations and home studies and a judge and a great deal of proper, patient, protective procedure, all of it exactly as thorough as it ought to be when a child’s whole life is at stake.

The four minutes were not the adoption.