It is not enough.

Nothing would be.

But it is what we have, and we do it faithfully.

I sometimes think about the girl on the porch, the nineteen-year-old with the duffel bag and the positive test and nowhere to go, and I want to tell her how the story ends.

I want to tell her that the family she thinks she is losing forever is not lost, only hidden behind a fear she cannot see, and that in ten years she will drive back down these roads with a daughter beside her and set the whole terrible secret free and find, waiting on the other side of it, not the ending she feared but the family she was always meant to have.

She would not have believed me.