He nudged the chair and pointed to the head of the table.
"I don't deserve to lead this family," he said. "Maybe I never will."
His voice was thick now, emotional but still strong.
"Because the men in this room—my boys—have proved themselves ten times the men I am."
He pulled a folded piece of paper from his pocket and laid it on the table.
"Boys," he said. "Help them. And I promise I'll be back."
No one moved.
No one spoke.
Dad walked to the door, opened it, and left.
The door clicked shut behind him.
For a long moment, no one said anything.
Then I leaned forward and picked up the paper.
Unfolded it.
My eyes went wide.
The paper said:Valentine, Texas. Look for the Danes.
I looked up at my brothers. At Silas. At every man in the room.
"There's more of us," I said.
EPILOGUE
JOY
Afew weeks after Deveaux Bank, grief didn’t arrive like a wave anymore.
It came like weather.
A sudden drop in pressure when I least expected it. A sharp, salt-tang memory that hit the back of my throat. A flicker of a woman’s voice—smooth, cruel, and then, for one brief second, almost … human.
Victoria.
My biological mother.
I’d checked. Quietly. Methodically. The sealed records my parents had once offered and I’d said I didn’t need. Her name had been there in black ink, unadorned and final.
The words still felt strange on my tongue, like saying them could summon her back from wherever the dead went to hide from the living.
Some mornings, I woke up angry. Some mornings, hollow. Some mornings, I could hold the whole complicated truth in my hands without shaking: that she gave me away and also didn’t want to; that she hurt people and also carried her own kind ofpain; that she died in front of Micah after dropping a truth I never asked for but now couldn’t un-know.
And my biological father …
That was the piece that kept snagging in my ribs like a fishhook.
Because there would probably never be a neat answer. His name hadn’t been in the records at all—no line filled in, no explanation offered. Just an empty space where a man should have been. No name to write down. No photo to stare at until resemblance appeared. Just a blank stretch in my lineage where someone had existed and then vanished, leaving only DNA and questions.
