"I always meant to, but I was afraid," Jack admits. "Afraid my sister would be angry with me for leaving her there, or my parents would attack me for abandoning them. Or even that they would accept me back as if nothing had happened." He worries that might be the worst, that all his anger and fear and guilt would have been for nothing, in the end, and that they would simply treat him as one of them. As if he was just like them.

"Then eventually I heard that the village had been destroyed by a flood, many years later," he adds, "and I did make an attempt to track down where the survivors went then, but my family wasn't with them."