For two years, everyone had been obsessed with whose genes belonged to whom.
Yet genes had never told the whole story.
If genetics alone defined family, that frozen cluster of cells would have represented something horrifying.
But genetics did not choose.
People did.
People raised children.
People protected them.
People betrayed them.
People apologized.
People stayed.
Three years after Flight 482, I took Caleb and Leah on a trip to Washington, D.C.
By then, Simone had begun serving her sentence.
Leah lived primarily with Aunt Rebecca while maintaining relationships with me and Darius under court supervision.
Caleb called Leah his sister.
Leah called him her brother.
Nobody corrected them.
Families earn the right to define themselves.
At the airport, Caleb was fourteen inches taller than he had been that Saturday morning.
He still loved airplanes.
For a while after Atlanta, he couldn’t stand them.
Then slowly the fear disappeared.
