I met him at the gate with a spine full of borrowed anger and a mouth full of questions I’d never asked out loud. But the man in front of me wasn’t the villain I had rehearsed; he was smaller than his absence, shoulders curved around an invisible burden. When he said my name again, it sounded like a confession, not a claim. My mother’s decision to cut him out of our story suddenly felt less like cruelty and more like a desperate kind of editing, a way to keep the sharpest edges from slicing us both open.
Signing the promotion papers later, surrounded by glass and fluorescent light, I realized I was accepting more than a new role. I was stepping into a life no longer defined by unfinished sentences and missing chapters. On the flight home, “Dad” hovered on my tongue—unsteady, fragile, but finally mine to decide.
