That thought visits me often, and it always comes with a small cold shiver, because of how close it was, how easily the other version of the story could have happened.

In that other version, I take Greg’s suggestion at face value.

I feel a comfortable philanthropic warmth, I set up a fund for the little girl in Colfax, I write a generous check for her therapies, and I drive home to my quiet house feeling that I have done a good thing, which I would have.

And a twenty-first family adopts her, or does not, and she grows up somewhere I never see, and I never know her name, and I go to my grave a solitary man who once did a kindness at a distance.

That version was right there.