Today, we chose you.”

And that was the sentence that finished me — today, we chose you — because in all twenty-two years it had never once occurred to me that it could go both ways.

I had chosen them; I knew that; I had chosen them every single day, in a thousand small unglamorous ways, and I had never expected or needed anything back, because that is what choosing a child means, that the choosing runs one direction and asks for nothing.

It had genuinely never crossed my mind that a day might come when they would turn around and choose me — deliberately, publicly, of their own grown free will, not because I was the only adult who happened to be there but because, having grown up and seen the whole of what I was, they looked at me and picked me on purpose.

A child is stuck with whoever raises her.

But these were not children anymore.