I deleted the alert and slid the phone back into my pocket, the last tether cut.

I climbed into the passenger seat.

Quinn slid behind the wheel and pressed the ignition, and the V8 roared to life — the same sound that would always remind me of the day we took our lives back.

We pulled out of the lot and onto the open highway, the warm May wind whipping through the windows, and I looked over at my daughter, unbroken, her eyes fixed on the bright road ahead, and I knew with total certainty that the curse I’d been born into had finally, permanently died.

Curses do not die on their own.

That is the thing my father understood, and the thing it took me forty years to learn from him.