I ADOPTED MY THREE BABY SISTERS AFTER OUR MOTHER ABAN:DONED US — 20 years later, they handed me a letter from her I was never meant to see.

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.”

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