To Kyle Belz-Thomas, an ideal life included a noisy house full of children. “Kyle is a strong, determined, caring man who would do anything to protect and support his family,” he once wrote of himself. He grew up as the youngest of three in New Baltimore, a suburb of Detroit on the shore of Lake St. Clair. His mother, who comes from a large Italian family, sent him to an all-boys Catholic high school, where he felt out of place and was teased regularly. When Kyle was twenty, he moved into his own apartment and came out to his family; to his relief, they were accepting. In 2014, on a dating app, he met Adam, an artist with a day job as a private-client banker, and spent the next year trying to get him to go on a date. Adam finally told him, “Come and find me, I’ll be outside mowing my lawn,” giving him only an approximate location. A week or so later, they went out for dinner and drinks. “He was nice, and he cared, and he was interested in what I did,” Adam told me recently. In 2016, they got married and moved with their three dogs into a four-bedroom house on more than two acres in a rural area outside Detroit. Kyle was thirty-five and working as an I.T. manager. He wanted to adopt a child in the next year. “We were both getting older, and, being a gay couple, we figured it would take a while to be matched with a baby,” Kyle said. “And we’d heard horror stories.”
They started researching adoption agencies. Then a friend of Kyle’s mentioned that a former middle-school classmate of theirs named Tara Lee was running her own adoption business. In January, 2017, he and Adam drove to a nearby Tim Hortons to meet her.
Lee, who was thirty-five, was waiting for them at a table with a manila file folder of paperwork. She was small, with shiny black hair, dark eyes, and a nose ring; her voice was high, like a child’s. She explained that she was a licensed social worker with a boutique adoption agency called Always Hope. She didn’t look or speak like the staff members from other agencies; she cursed and had tattoos running down both arms, which gave her a folksy air that she said made it easier to bond with young pregnant women, who were often dealing with addiction, poverty, and other challenges. During their meeting, Adam noticed an expensive-looking watch on Lee’s wrist that seemed at odds with her image.
Many adoption agencies are affiliated with churches that disapprove of gay couples; Lee said that she had never worked with a same-sex couple, but that she had no objection to it. “It felt like a comfortable fit,” Adam recalled. He and Kyle signed the paperwork that day and gave Lee a deposit of twenty-five hundred dollars. They prepared a twenty-two-page book about their family, filled with descriptions and photos of their home and of their parents, siblings, nieces, and nephews. One image showed Kyle cradling a newborn; another showed Adam in his art studio, where he makes custom figurines of people’s pets.
Lee began sending them profiles of potential birth mothers, or “first mothers,” as they’re sometimes called. In April, 2017, Lee sent an e-mail about Angel, whose due date was July 8th. After a horrific sexual assault, Lee said, Angel had become pregnant, and was now determined to give up the baby. She was twenty-one and already had a two-year-old son, whom she was raising on her own. Lee encouraged Kyle and Adam to send their book to Angel, and they were thrilled when Lee told them that Angel had chosen them as adoptive parents. The total cost of the adoption would be around twenty-five thousand dollars, which included eight thousand dollars for Angel’s living expenses. According to state regulations, those could include housing, food, and medical treatment.