He could go looking for his answers and not lose his way.

He could hold out forgiveness with one hand without letting go of home with the other.

I had raised a better man than I’d realized — better, maybe, than me.

Because I could not have done what my son did.

I know that about myself.

If I had been the one wronged the way Keegan was wronged — abandoned as a child, left to be raised by someone else’s mercy — I do not think I would have had the grace to answer that Instagram message, to have the lunches, to reach across fourteen years of justified anger and offer a coward a handshake.

I would have wanted the door shut and bolted, and I would have called the bolting strength.