Elias looked at the mountain of data he’d gathered, then at the empty suitcase on his bed. He realized the resources weren't there to tell him what to do; they were there to exhaust his excuses. He closed the laptop.
The final resource, #2,676, was not a link. It was a prompt, a simple blinking cursor beneath a single line of text:
He scrolled faster, the blur of links becoming a waterfall of possibility. There were maps to towns that didn't exist on Google, recipes for meals that tasted like "forgiveness," and contact information for people who were looking for exactly someone like him. At resource #2,675, the screen went white.
