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.