I found him in a hallway that smelled of iodine and damp wool, lying in a basket that had once held laundry and now held nothing but a child and the cold. The hospital had been evacuated three hours earlier, and the building was empty except for me and the dying and the dead.

It was 1919. The war had ended eight months before, but Paris still carried itself like a wounded animal, limping through the streets with one leg shorter than the other and pretending it did not hurt. I was twenty-eight years old, a lieutenant with a bullet in my shoulder and a tremor in my left hand that I hid by keeping it in my pocket, and I was walking back from a bar where I had gone to forget the sound of a boy from Ohio calling for his mother in a trench outside Reims.

The basket was on the third floor, outside Room 314. The door was open, and the room was empty except for a bed with the sheets torn off and a window that would not close. I should have gone to the front desk. I should have found a nurse. Instead, I knelt down and looked into the basket, and the child looked up at me with eyes that were too old for his face and decided, in that moment, that he was mine.

Not in the way that matters. Not in the legal sense or the moral sense. In the way that a man who has seen everything he loves destroyed decides that one small, breathing thing is going to be the exception.

I wrapped him in my overcoat and carried him down three flights of stairs and out into the street, where the city was trying to pretend it was normal. There were musicians playing jazz in a cafe on the corner, and the sound was so obscene in its joy that I almost laughed. I walked for two hours with the child against my chest, feeling his small heartbeat through the wool, and when I reached the Gare du Nord, I bought a ticket to Calais and a ticket from Calais to Dover and a ticket from Dover to Folkestone and told myself this was a plan and not just a series of desperate decisions strung together like rope.

His name, I would learn later from a nurse who remembered him, was David. The nurse, a woman named Eleanor with kind eyes and tired hands, told me his mother had been a patient in Room 314, a civilian who had been caught in the bombing of a nearby munitions depot. She had survived the initial attack but died of an infection three days later. The father was unknown. The child had been placed in the laundry basket by someone who may or may not have been a relative and then abandoned when that person realized the responsibility was permanent.

I did not ask the nurse if she thought I was crazy. I asked her if he would survive the journey to England, and she said yes, he would survive anything, and I believed her because she was a nurse and nurses are the only people in the world who are allowed to be optimistic without being mocked.

I brought him to Long Island in the spring of 1925. I told everyone it was because my shoulder was better, because I needed the sea, because my cousin Calloway had insisted I visit her and her husband, who lived in a house that cost more than my annual salary and smelled of flowers that had never known dirt. I did not tell them about the child. I told them the child was in a nursery in Manhattan, being cared for by people who knew what they were doing, and this was technically true, though the people in question were the Sisters of St. Joseph and the arrangement was temporary and Eleanor Vance was the only reason it existed at all.

Eleanor had stayed in Paris. She had not married anyone, which surprised me, though I had no right to expect anything from her. She was twenty-six, beautiful in a way that had nothing to do with symmetry and everything to do with the fact that she had seen the same things I had seen and had not become hard. She ran a private practice in Manhattan now, caring for children who had been broken by things they were too young to understand. David was one of them. I visited every Sunday, and Eleanor would bring him to me, wrapped in a blanket the color of the sea, and he would reach for me with his small hands and I would feel something in my chest unclench that I had not known was tight.

You are a terrible father, Eleanor told me once, and she said it with a smile, and I knew she was right. I did not know how to change his diaper or feed him anything that was not formula or sing him to sleep without falling asleep myself. But he loved me anyway, or loved the idea of me, which is the same thing at that age.

The parties at Miss Calloway's house were the kind of events that made me want to drink until I could not feel my legs. There were perhaps forty people in a room that held sixty, and everyone was wearing something that cost more than a car, and everyone was laughing at jokes that were not funny and drinking gin that tasted like turpentine and pretending that the war had been a adventure and not the worst thing that had ever happened to a generation.

I stood on the terrace with a glass of whiskey that I was not drinking and watched the chandeliers swing and thought about David, who was asleep in a room somewhere in this enormous house, being watched by a nurse who was not his mother and would never be his mother and who loved him in the way that paid professionals love the people they are paid to care for, which is to say with competence and occasional genuine affection.

Charlie, his wife said, appearing at my side like magic. She was pretty in the way that people are pretty when they have never known hunger or violence or loss. She had blonde hair and a laugh like bells and eyes that had never seen anything darker than a cocktail menu. You look like you are at a funeral, she said.

It is the same thing, I said, and then I regretted it because it was cruel and she had done nothing to deserve it.

She looked at me for a moment, and for a second, just a second, I thought she understood. Then she smiled and said, Well, don't look so miserable. The band is starting.

I went inside and danced with women whose names I would forget before the night was over, and I smiled and said the right things and drank the wrong things, and at midnight I drove back to Manhattan in a taxi that cost too much and sat in the back seat and watched the city pass by and thought about the child who was mine by nothing more than a decision I had made in a hallway that smelled of iodine.

The tremor in my left hand was worse that winter. I could not hold a glass without it shaking. I could not sleep without waking at three in the morning and sitting in the dark until dawn. I went to see a doctor in New York, a man with gentle hands and a office full of books, and he told me that what I was experiencing was not physical and had a name, which made it worse, because now it was official.

You need something to hold onto, he said.

I thought of David.

One night in February, I dreamed I was back in the trench outside Reims. The boy from Ohio was calling for his mother, and I could not reach him, and the mud was pulling him down, and I was pulling too, and we were both going under, and the last thing I heard was not his mother's voice but the sound of a baby crying in a hallway that smelled of iodine.

I woke up and called Eleanor. She came at dawn, and I told her I wanted to adopt David.

She did not look surprised. When did you decide?

Last night. In a dream.

She was quiet for a moment. Then: He needs more than a decision, Charlie. He needs a home. He needs a mother. He needs someone who is not going to wake up at three in the morning and sit in the dark and drink whiskey and pretend he is fine.

I know, I said.

So what are you going to do about it?

I did not have an answer. I drove back to Long Island and stood on the terrace and watched the sun come up over the water and thought about what it meant to choose something in a world that had proven that choices did not matter. The shells did not care which side you were on. The infection did not care how brave you were. The baby in the hallway had been abandoned by someone who had made a choice, and I had made another, and neither of us had had any idea what we were choosing.

But I was choosing again. That was the point, I think. Not that the choice would save him, but that it would save me.

I went to Miss Calloway's library and wrote a check that would reduce my savings to a fraction of what it had been and hired a nanny from Ireland who had references and kind eyes and a reputation for being firm but fair. I told Eleanor I loved her, which was true but also not the right thing to say at the wrong time, and she looked at me in a way I could not read and said, Charlie, you are doing this for the right reasons, but the right reasons do not always make the right choices.

I did not understand her then. I understand her now.

The last time I saw Paris before I decided to stay in England permanently, I walked past the hospital on a cold morning. The building was repaired, the windows were whole, the hallway was clean. I stood outside for ten minutes and then turned around and walked to the station and bought a ticket home.

David was learning to walk. He fell down three times before breakfast and got up three times and laughed each time, and I laughed with him, and for a moment, just a moment, the tremor in my hand stopped, and I felt something I had not felt since the hallway with the iodine: something that was not peace, exactly, but was close enough.