Chapter 5 - The Drive to Canada
The drive north from upstate New York toward the Canadian border took six hours through the dark, winding roads of the Adirondacks.
Dad didn't speak for the first three hours. He sat in the passenger seat of the black SUV, staring out the rain-streaked window at the blurring pines, holding the leather ledger on his lap with both hands.
I drove in silence, gripping the steering wheel, my mind racing through the fragments of my childhood. I had always thought our family was unbreakable. I had looked up to my mother as an untouchable icon of grace, intelligence, and unwavering loyalty.
Now, looking at the faded photographs tucked inside the ledger—pictures of a baby boy with dark hair and hazel eyes, raised by a wealthy Canadian family in Montreal—I realized I had never truly known the woman who raised me.
"Are you angry at her, Dad?" I asked softly as we crossed into the rolling farmland near the border checkpoint.
Dad didn't turn his head away from the window immediately. He let out a long, shuddering sigh that seemed to release decades of accumulated weight from his broad shoulders.
"Angry?" Dad murmured. "No, Maya. I’m not angry. I’m just... sad."
He turned to look at me, his slate-gray eyes softening in the dim dashboard light.
"Your mother carried a secret for thirty years that must have felt like a burning coal in her chest every single day," Dad continued quietly. "She built an empire with me, she raised you and your brother, she smiled at board meetings and charity galas, all while a piece of her heart was locked away in a freezing vault in Montreal. That is a terrible way to live, Maya. To love someone so much that you have to lie about it to survive."
"Do you think we'll find him?" I asked, slowing the SUV as the border crossing lights flickered ahead through the mist.
May you like
"We'll find him," Dad said, his voice steady and resolute. "Not to interrogate him, and not to drag him into our corporate wars. Just to tell him... that his mother never forgot him."
The border agent waved us through after a brief inspection of our passports, and our tires hummed against the Canadian asphalt as we pressed deeper into the quiet, snow-dusted night toward Montreal.
