Duan Jeffries and Susan Jeffries

Duan Jeffries and Susan Jeffries have a relationship marked by childhood abandonment and an adult reunion that brings no repair. Susan left her husband and three children when Duan was twelve; nearly eighteen years later, Duan used the investigative skills he had built into a career to find her, hoping for remorse and closure. Instead, her indifference confirmed the distance between the mother he had wanted to face and the woman he found.

Family Background and Abandonment

Susan’s departure left Duan, his younger brother Terrence Jeffries, and their little sister Olivia Jeffries Westmoreland without their mother. Olivia was three, Terrence ten, and Duan twelve. As the oldest child, Duan felt responsible for Terrence, while Olivia tried to take Susan’s place. The children’s different ages and roles made the loss a family rupture, not simply Duan’s private grievance.

The departure also shaped Duan’s view of his father, Orin Jeffries. He regarded Orin as a devoted parent who had to take on both parental roles and never complained. Duan admired him and felt that Susan had put him through considerable hardship. At his brother’s wedding, Duan saw Orin beside the woman he had married a few months earlier and privately counted their marriage among the love matches that had made him reconsider his cynicism about lasting love. That moment offers a pointed contrast: Duan could recognize the possibility of happiness in his father’s later life even as his own history with Susan remained unresolved.

The Search and Failed Reunion

Duan did not see Susan for a long time after she left. A few days before his thirtieth birthday, following the opening of his investigative firm, he decided to use his professional abilities to track her down. He told himself that he needed closure, but also hoped she would feel remorse and shame for having failed to contact her children. His search was therefore more than an exercise in locating a missing person: it carried the expectation that Susan might acknowledge what she had done.

The meeting overturned that expectation. Duan found no remorse in Susan, only annoyance that he had disturbed her. She told him she had left for a reason, had never wanted children, did not consider herself maternal, and did not want to renew a relationship with any of her children. Her refusal made clear that the reunion Duan had hoped might offer recognition would not become reconciliation.

Duan returned to Atlanta and heard Terrence say that he had known the search would end badly. Terrence had not tried to see Susan and had already decided to move on. The brothers responded differently to the same abandonment: Duan sought an answer directly from their mother, while Terrence accepted her departure at face value. The experience had marked all three siblings, but Duan understood it as especially damaging to Orin.

Forgiveness and Its Limits

Before searching for Susan, Duan had intended to tell her that he had forgiven her and to find closure for himself. What he discovered instead led him to conclude that she did not deserve his forgiveness, or Terrence’s, Olivia’s, or Orin’s. His stated wish to forgive and the judgment formed after meeting her are distinct stages of the relationship: the search was undertaken in hope of resolution, but Susan’s response hardened rather than eased the injury.

Duan later calls his inability to forgive the person who gave birth to him the ugliness in his life. He says that he had tried, and that he had gone so far as to find Susan as an adult. His account leaves the wound active: reaching her did not supply the remorse or connection he had sought, and he does not describe a renewed relationship afterward.

Effects on Duan’s Relationships

Duan connects his own experience of Susan’s departure with Kimani Cannon’s history of being hurt by her father. Both he and Kim had parental wounds they struggled to put behind them, and both had come to fear the possibility of a fulfilling marriage. Susan’s abandonment had made commitment frightening to Duan, because he believed she had deserted not only her husband but also the children she had given birth to.

His developing love for Kim changes that expectation without erasing the past. He sees Kim as loyal and dedicated, and believes she would not abandon a partner or children. In contrast to Susan, Kim represents a form of commitment Duan can begin to trust; he credits her with making the idea of settling down less frightening. The comparison shows the lasting reach of his relationship with his mother: it informs his suspicions about family life, while his attachment to Kim gives him reason to imagine a different outcome.

Susan’s own appeal to forgiveness enters the story through her conversation with Kim about Kim’s father. She says that she had forgiven him and could move on, and urges Kim to forgive as well. The contrast is consequential: Susan presents forgiveness as a route beyond a painful past, while Duan’s account of their reunion centers on the absence of remorse and his refusal to absolve her. Their estrangement therefore remains a measure of the difference between forgiveness as an ideal and the acknowledgment Duan never received.