Which is why any network engineer worth their salt with ask for a trace in both directions (if available). Asymmetric routing can be an issue especially when going through stateful devices like firewalls.
I'm not going to tell you how long I've at one time been searching for a missing route on the return path of a VPN connection... But damn the lights that went on when I realized that hurt by being too bright.
Packet traces do not lie, per se, but they represent only a certain perspective. More perspectives are needed for problems to come into focus.