To be left by your father, only to learn that he wasn’t even your father, Mad tried to imagine it. To have traveled so many miles in search of a person who hadn’t even made you. But maybe that was the point. How had he truly made any of them? He had left. His absence is what had shaped them, and maybe the actual biology of it was second to that fact. And what finally might have pushed Mad toward this possibility, to allow this young child to accompany them, was that, when he finally learned the truth, he would be less alone in the world because of this moment.
