They knew what that meant. Neither of them had to ask for specifics.

“I wasn’t sure if this was the right decision,” she continued. “But then it hit me the last time I spoke with him. Your father said he wanted to pick up the pieces and start over. I got angry at him. I’d been thinking about that for some time until I realized this. Some pieces aren’t meant to be picked up and patched back together. Some pieces are meant to stay broken and left where they belong.”

“Mom—”

“Wait,” she told Thomas, knowing that he might disagree with her. “Just wait. I believe that. Sometimes, like in our case, it’s impossible to just ‘start over.’ That’s a fairy tale. Yet I do believe that it’s possible to start again without that baggage. You leave the hurt and the pain on the side of the road like scraps from a car crash. You don’t throw them away because you need to remember. Yet at the same time you realize that you’re still alive and still in one piece and that God’s given you a chance to keep going down that road. So you keep driving and you see where the road takes you.”

“Are we going to move back in with him?” Sara asked.

“No,” Lynn said. “All I’m going to promise your father is this. That we’re willing to see him this summer. It starts there. And then—we’ll see.”

“We’ll see what?” Sara asked.

“We’ll see.”

Some roads were made of dirt and dust and remain unnamed. They didn’t see many fancy cars and didn’t get much use. But they were still valuable because they were still going somewhere.

As the car stopped in front of the freshly painted house in the middle of this back road to nowhere, Thomas couldn’t help but remember their leaving a year and a half ago. That was a different story and a different destination.

The new paint seemed to match the new story.

It took him a few minutes before he saw what waited for them on the porch.

There were a dozen gifts in silver and gold baking in the sun.

Seeing the gifts made him smile. Especially the new bicycle resting against the house with a big bow attached to its shiny exterior.

Thomas liked to believe. He liked to think that every dusty road could lead to somewhere special. Not just a destination, but an experience. An experience and a purpose.

He liked to think that it wasn’t about the destination.

He’d always believed that he—that they—could make something out of nothing, right alongside this dirty, dusty road.

Climbing out of the car, then seeing the face of the man who called himself Dad, Thomas knew he had a chance to do something special.

This was one more gift he’d been given.

A chance to forgive.

To forgive and to start again.

Acknowledgments

I’d like to thank: