The Couple Who Said Yes to Someone Else's Baby

In 2019, a nurse named Marcus and his wife Elaine in Memphis, Tennessee, were finishing a quiet dinner when a social worker called. A newborn at the hospital — barely six hours old — needed an emergency foster placement by morning. The birth circumstances were complicated. The paperwork was tangled. Nothing about the situation fit the tidy adoption timeline Marcus and Elaine had mapped out on their refrigerator whiteboard.…