I’ve never told the court that.

It isn’t the kind of thing that fits in a guardianship application — there’s no box for it, no line that asks have you personally survived the outcome you are asking us to prevent. On paper I am exactly what the state’s attorney says I am: a single man of modest means with no parenting experience and no business taking on five children at once.

On paper I am the risky choice, and any careful person reviewing the file would circle my name and shake their head.

I understand that.

I’ve read the file too.

But there is a whole life underneath that file that the file cannot see, and in about an hour I am going to have to decide whether to open it up in front of a room full of strangers — whether to take the one private thing I have carried alone for twenty years and set it down on a podium, because it might be the only thing heavy enough to keep five children together.

I have never wanted to do anything less.

I am going to do it anyway.

Chapter 2 — Five Small Faces

Three weeks ago I didn’t know these children existed.

I found them the way you find a weather report — by accident, glancing at something else.

I volunteer a few evenings a week at the community center downtown, and part of that work brushes up against the county’s emergency placement system, the pipeline that catches kids when the bottom drops out of their lives with no warning.

That’s where I saw the photograph.

Five small faces, dark confused eyes, taken the day after a house fire took both their parents in a single night and left five kids under seven with no one.