Employment verification.

A physician’s letter for each of us stating we were physically capable.

Three references who were not family.

And a home study, which is an interview about your own childhood, conducted by a stranger, in your living room, for two and a half hours.

I was asked in that interview whether I had children of my own, and why not, and I answered, and it is in a file somewhere in a building on Michigan Avenue.

Esme came to our house on the twenty-second of October.