Page 133 of It Must Be Fate

“I am.”

“Thisis who you want to adopt?”

She nods once. Her eyes never once move away from the boy-slash-man in question. She doesn’t look at me and that in it of itself makes me want to bring down the blinds on the one-way window so she can’t look at him any longer.

“Yes. I have a feeling, I can’t explain it. I think he was meant to be in our lives.”

“He’s eighteen years old. He doesn’t need us.”

That makes her turn around.

Finally.

And now I regret the words, regret wanting her to look at me, because she faces me with a look of such dismay anddisappointment on her features that I want to rewind time and undo the last thirty seconds.

“What eighteen-year-old doesn’t need their parents? Who’s going to house him, take care of him, push him to succeed?” Quieter, she adds, “Don’t you wish your parents had been there for you?”

I scowl at her. “No, they didn’t deserve to be.”

“Well, he deserves to have parents capable of loving him.” She turns away once more. “It’s never too late to save someone.”

Six faces the window, her eyes back on the boy.

He has no way of knowing there’s anybody on the other side of the window, let alone her, and yet it’s almost as if he senses her gaze. The moment her gaze finds him, his face turns away from the cops and his eyes connect unseeingly with hers through the glass.

He’s undeniably handsome, even with the bruise forming on the right side of his face and the defiant sneer contorting his rather unique features. A straight, stiff jawline, marred by an angry scar that cuts from his ear diagonally down to the middle of his jaw. Eyes that burn so hotly with rage they’re nearly vivid red. A nose that’s been broken a few times. A smattering of beauty marks on his unblemished cheek.

His evident rage makes him striking.

“He’s violent,” I point out. “He’s got issues.”

“He needs to be loved,” she argues.

Earlier in the year, Six had heard about his family’s case through a couple of social workers she works with. Even though she’d already been swamped with her current workload, my wife had been unable to turn her back on someone who so clearly needed her, as was typical for her.

She’d decided to take the case on and had specifically worked with the boy’s parents to try and rehabilitate them.

She’d gotten them jobs and access to resources to get clean. She’d gone above and beyond to help them.

Four months ago, she’d gotten a letter from both of them officially declaring their intent to terminate their parenting rights over the boy. She’d tried to track them down, but they’d disappeared back into the circles of vice they’d originally come from.

Two months later, today, she gets a call from the police department telling her the boy has been arrested for assaulting a homeless man and that her business card was found on him.

And now she wants us to adopt him.

After she almost died giving birth to Astra, I waited years for her to come to me and tell me she was ready to adopt another baby. When she never did, I grew tired of waiting and asked her about it myself.

Every time, the answer was the same.

I’m not ready. I’m happy with what we have.

It’s not like I disagreed. I was happy with it being the three of us for the rest of time, I just wanted her to feel the same.

When it became clear she wasn’t interested in adopting, I stopped asking. To say I was caught off guard when the request finally reemerged this morning after being dormant for eighteen years is an understatement.

Finding out that she wanted to adopt not a baby, not even a kid, but an actual man in the eyes of the law, had been another shock. Learning he needed to be picked up at the police station had been the third and final surprise, the one that had nearly finished me.

Six seems blind to reason, my very numerous and valid arguments falling on deaf ears.

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