Totoka River Try to convince ourselves.

You could talk to her. It was tempting, incredibly so. All Ephraim wanted now that he knew they were there was to reconnect with his long lost family. Maybe not his father. Kierkegaard had ever been a cold and stoic man whom Ephraim shared almost no bond with. But the rest of them? He couldn't remember their faces or names at all, wouldn't recognize them in a crowd save for Caiaphas (and Illidan, perhaps, for being their dam's lookalike), but he would have liked to return to them. It wasn't as though he chose what life had dealt him.

But for all the things he didn't know or recall about his family, there was one thing he was absolutely certain of, because Heda had told him so, and Heda didn't lie. She would kill me. And not in the way a mother might "kill" their son for having a half-naked girl in their bedroom when she got home from church, but in the literal sense. Ephraim, coward that he was, had no interest in laying his life on the line.

She left me there. She doesn't want me, he pointed out. Not that he would have left Drageda with Caiaphas if she tried to make him, because at that time Ephraim had believed in Drageda and believed she was just a villain, but still. She hadn't tried to reach out to her son since learning he was there, and he wasn't going to try to reach out to her now that he was aware of her, even if it broke a piece of his heart.