I followed her downstairs, my heart going faster than I could keep up with, begging her to slow down, to sit for one minute, to give me even a single day before doing something we couldn’t undo.
She opened the front door anyway.
“Mom, please,” I said. “They need you.”
She lingered there for a moment, one hand on the frame, looking at me like there was something else she wanted to say. Whatever it was, she didn’t say it. She just walked out to her car and drove away without another word.
There was no aunt waiting somewhere to step in. No grandparent with room in her house. No distant relative who’d suddenly appear to save us the way people always assume someone will.
There was just me.
I called Chicago that same week and turned down the only job offer I’d ever truly wanted.
For a while, I told myself she’d come back. I checked the driveway every night for months longer than I probably should have. Eventually, though, I stopped waiting and started gathering the paperwork instead — the forms, the home visits, the long, exhausting process of legally becoming the guardian, and eventually the adoptive father, of three babies who were, biologically, my own sisters.
People had opinions about it. Most of them felt entitled to share those opinions directly to my face.
“Micah, you’re twenty-three,” a coworker told me once, not unkindly, just baffled. “You’re giving up your whole life.”
