I did not know that this drive, undertaken for my daughter’s sake and not for any grander reason, would turn out to be the journey that finally set all of it down.

I had built my whole adult life around the assumption that the promise I made to Julian was a life sentence, a thing I would carry silently until I was an old woman, that there would never come a safe day to lay it down.

I had made a kind of peace with that, the way you make peace with a chronic pain, by folding it into who you are and no longer imagining life without it.

So I was not driving to Ohio to unburden myself.