Because here is the thing I had not let myself feel yet, in the cold clean rush of scanning and packing: I did not actually know what waited for us at the end of that road.

I knew what the letters said.

But I had believed Grayson’s version of his family for eleven years, and a story you have believed that long does not evaporate the instant you find it was false.

Some frightened animal part of me kept whispering that maybe he had been a little bit right — that maybe they had written the letters out of duty, that maybe we really would not fit, that maybe I was about to drive my two children four hours through the night only to watch a room full of wealthy strangers look at us with the polite distaste I had spent a decade being told to expect.

And I decided, somewhere around the third hour, that it did not matter, because even if the worst were true, my children deserved to find it out for themselves, in the light, from the actual people — not filtered forever through the self-serving lies of the man who had stolen eleven summers from them.