I had been starving for something without knowing it, moving through a comfortable well-fed life that was nonetheless a kind of famine, and when Greg described a child who needed a home, some deep part of me that had gone quiet years before suddenly stood up and said: there.

That.

Go.

The reasonable part of me argued for the check right up until the moment I turned the car toward Colfax instead of home, and then it fell silent, outvoted at last by a hunger it had spent a decade successfully suppressing.

I am so grateful that the hunger won.

I spent nine years feeding the reasonable part and calling the result peace.

It took a refused child to remind me that a man is not meant to live that carefully, and that the risks I had spent so long avoiding were the only things that could have saved me.