I recite the first verse of Rudyard Kipling's "If" nearly every morning. Have done for years. It is the poem my Yorkshire grandfather would deliver again and again, a stoic man of few words but brilliant at monologues. I asked for his recitations endlessly. That poem did not just stay with me. It wove itself into The Adventures of Gabriel.

When Gabriel and I started our Friday night FaceTime sessions, I was not consciously thinking about Kipling. I was thinking about one hour a week, about keeping connection alive during impossible circumstances, about giving my son something to hold onto. But the themes found their way in anyway. The Adventures of Gabriel became a metaphor about not giving up. And then, at the very end of The Shadow of Zuff, Gabriel's magical journal glows and tells him: "If you can fill the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds' worth of distance run, yours is the earth and everything that's in it." Gabriel and Platy look at one another and smile.

When teachers receive Gabriel's books, they see adventure stories. Dragons, chess puzzles, bamboo labyrinths. They do not always see the scaffolding underneath: the resilience framework, the emotional regulation through metaphor, the literary lineage connecting a Yorkshire grandfather's voice to a young boy's published work. But it is all there.

Every story has layers. The children working through StoryQuest are weaving their own. Fears becoming dragons. Hopes becoming heroes. Lived experiences becoming narratives they control. My grandfather could not have known his Yorkshire voice would echo in his great-grandson's books. But here we are. That is how stories work. They travel through generations, across cultures, into imaginations we will never meet.