The grief of losing Jonathan and the children was an ocean.

This was something smaller and colder and, in its way, just as final: the quiet death of every remaining hope I had held for the people who shared my blood.

And I want to be honest about that hope, because it is the thing that had kept me tied to them for so long, and it is the thing most people in my position spend years unable to release.

For my entire life, I had loved my parents with a love that was, I see now, less about who they actually were than about who I kept hoping they might someday become.