I was a pediatric surgeon. I was scheduled to perform a risky heart surgery on little Owen, six years old.

I told her everything—about Owen, about the dinosaur, about the way he asked for stories because the machines were too loud. About the parents who saved his life by bringing him in and destroyed it by walking away.

When I finished, Nora was quiet for a long moment. Then she asked something I hadn’t expected.

“Where is he right now?”

“Still in the hospital. Social services is trying to find emergency placement.”

She turned fully toward me, and I recognized that look—the same one she’d worn during conversations about children, family, and dreams that hadn’t unfolded the way we’d planned.

“Can we go see him tomorrow?” she asked softly.

“Nora, we don’t—”

“I know,” she interrupted. “We don’t have a nursery. We don’t have experience. We’ve tried for years.” She took my hand. “But maybe it wasn’t supposed to happen that way. Maybe it was supposed to happen like this.”

One visit became two. Then three. And I watched my wife fall in love with a little boy who needed us just as much as we needed him.

The adoption process was brutal—home studies, interviews, background checks designed to make you question whether you deserved to be a parent at all.

But none of it was as hard as those first weeks with Owen.

He wouldn’t sleep in his bed. Instead, he curled up on the floor beside it, tight and small, like he was trying to disappear. I slept in the doorway—not because I thought he’d run, but because I needed him to understand that people could stay.

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