Chapter 7 - The Road HomeWeston drives Route 9 sometimes now, on purpose, which is something he never expected to do again after that afternoon.
Ivy is six. She still has the family eyes, and she has started asking careful, three-a.m.-worthy questions about the father she never met, which Elena and Weston answer together, honestly, in pieces sized for a child, the same way they've decided to answer every hard question that will inevitably come as she grows older.
He and Elena are not what they were twenty-six years ago, and they've both been careful not to pretend otherwise. But they've built something else in its place — not a romance rekindled, but a family reassembled, imperfectly, out of the wreckage his mother left behind and the son neither of them ever got the chance to properly know.
May you like
Sometimes, driving that stretch of empty gravel road, Weston still pictures the wagon, the mattress, the woman with her shoulders slumped in exhaustion, and the little girl gripping the back of her shirt. He thinks about how close he came to driving right past all of it, on a road he only took because his usual one was closed.
He doesn't believe in fate, not exactly. But he believes, now, in paying attention to the roads you didn't plan on taking — because sometimes the truth your family spent twenty-six years burying is standing on the shoulder, waiting for you to finally slow down.
