Blood made us relatives.

Their choices made them strangers.

Chloe’s choices — to fight, to hold on, to survive long enough for me to reach her — made her my family, the truest I have ever had.

I sent a hundred thousand dollars home over four years, believing I was protecting a family.

It turned out the family worth protecting was the one woman everyone else had thrown away.

I did not understand, when I walked around the back of that beautiful, lying house, that I was about to find the only thing in the world I had actually been fighting for, kneeling in the mud, refusing to die.