He listened, then said, “You can’t stop thinking about her.”
“I can’t,” I admitted. “She’s been waiting her whole life.”
“We’re not young,” he said. “If we do this, we’ll be in our 70s by the time she’s grown.”
“I know.”
“And there’s money, energy, school, college,” he added.
“We try not to build expectations we can’t meet.”
“I know,” I said again.
After a long silence, he said, “Do you want to meet her? Just meet her. No promises.”
Two days later, we walked into the children’s home. A social worker led us to a playroom.
“She knows she’s meeting visitors,” the social worker said. “We didn’t tell her more. We try not to build expectations we can’t meet.”
In the playroom, Lily sat at a small table, coloring carefully inside the lines. Her dress was a little too big, like it had been passed down too many times.
“Are you old?”
The birthmark covered most of the left side of her face, dark and obvious, but her eyes were serious and watchful, like she’d learned to read adults before trusting them.
I knelt beside her. “Hi, Lily. I’m Margaret.”
She glanced at the social worker, then back at me. “Hi,” she whispered.
