Chosen Before the Envelope Was Opened

In 2019, a woman named Lisa Goich-Andreadis from Detroit published a memoir about discovering, at age forty-three, that she had been adopted. Her parents had never told her. But when she finally obtained her original birth records and traced her biological mother, she learned something that broke her open with wonder: her adoptive parents had requested her specifically. They had seen her photograph in the hospital nursery, learned her story, and told the agency, "That one.…