Every step up those porch stairs, the old trained voice in my head was reciting Grayson’s version — that these were cold, exacting people who would find me and my children beneath them, that I was about to humiliate us all by forcing our way into a place we had been told again and again we did not belong.

Belief is a physical thing, I have learned.

Eleven years of a story does not live only in your mind; it lives in your posture, your breath, the way your hand hesitates on a door.

And so I pushed those doors open not because I had stopped being afraid, but because I had finally decided that my fear was, itself, one more thing Grayson had installed in me, one more piece of his architecture, and that the only way to find out whether it was true was to walk through it.

I would rather, I had decided somewhere on that dark highway, be humiliated by the truth than comforted by his lie for one more summer.