“Héloïse,” says his wife. She’s dressed for the social worker rather than for Thora, patterned dress swapped for a gray suit, braids bound back in a bun. It makes her look stiff, nervous, nothing like herself. Then she smiles, and her warmth shines through. Instead of shaking hands, she waves. Thora, surprised, looks up with a smile that’s almost a laugh.

They sit down at a table outside the Kinderheim. It’s not much of a garden: dying grass, a shallow pond, straggling trees ineptly screening the main road that leads back to the city center. Thora sits with her hands between her knees, answering their questions without making eye contact. Santi doesn’t have much experience with kids; he can’t help reading her as if she is a client visiting his office, rather than his prospective child. Smart, withdrawn, deeply hurt in a way that she pushes outward. A sense of humor that bites.

“What’s your favorite thing to do here?” Héloïse leans forward, trying to get under Thora’s guard.

Thora meets her eyes. “Watching the grass grow,” she says, deadpan. “That’s pretty fun.”

Santi’s laugh jumps out of him. An answering smile quirks the edge of Thora’s mouth before it disappears.

After the visit, the social worker escorts them back to their car. They watch through the windshield as a boy chips away at the balustrade of the Kinderheim with a rusty nail.

“What do you think?” Héloïse asks.

Santi looks across at her. “She’s ours,” he says simply.

Héloïse nods, tears shining in her eyes. “Yeah,” she says in a whisper. “Yeah, I thought so too.”

They fill out a hundred forms, attend a dozen interviews. They answer questions about their marriage, their daily routine, how long they have lived in Cologne. They bear it all, if not with patience, then with determination. Finally, they get their prize: a file containing Thora’s history, laid out year by year with accompanying photos. A baby with her eyes, blue and desperate, as if the sullen girl they met is trapped in there. Santi turns the page to meet her parents: a mother who left when she was two, a father who lost his position at the university after funding cuts and slowly succumbed to alcoholism, until social services battered down the door to find a trail of empty bottles and Thora screaming with a toddler’s rage. He reads of her being passed on to a neglectful uncle—a picture of her in a sweater knitted for a much smaller child, with a design of a badger who looks almost as angry as she does—then to a string of foster families until she wound up at the Kinderheim. Where she would have stayed, labeled a lost cause, had Santi and Héloïse not shown up with their empty nursery and their long-dried tears.