Every week, he seemed to watch carefully to see whether I would show up again.
But underneath the caution, he was kind.
Quietly kind.
And he remembered everything.
One afternoon, I casually mentioned that Grace had hated raisins.
The words slipped out before I even realized I had spoken about her.
Usually, people became uncomfortable when I mentioned my children.
Luke simply nodded.
Three weeks later, we were sitting in a café when he pushed a cookie toward me.
“Don’t worry,” he said without looking up from his book. “I checked. No raisins.”
I stared at him.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
But it wasn’t nothing.
He had remembered one tiny detail about a girl he would never meet.
He had carried it around for three weeks.
Then turned it into an act of kindness.
I had to look away.
That was the day I knew.
—
Eventually, adoption came up.
Carefully.
Like both of us were afraid that saying the word too loudly might make it disappear.
“You’d really want that?” Luke asked one afternoon.
“Yes.”
“Permanent?”
“That’s generally what adoption means.”
He picked at the label on his water bottle.
“What if I mess everything up?”
“Then we deal with whatever you messed up.”
“What if you regret adopting me?”
“Then I would be an adult experiencing a feeling,” I said. “And you would still be my son.”
He looked down.
“You make everything sound simple.”
“No,” I said. “I make commitment sound simple.”
I paused.
“Because commitment is simple. It means you stay.”
He became very quiet after that.
At the time, I didn’t understand why those words mattered so much.
Later, I would.
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