My father cut me off after I adopted a child that he said “wasn’t really mine.” We didn’t speak for four years. Then, in a grocery store, my son saw him, walked up without hesitation, and said something that made my father cry.
My father sat at the head of the table, posture straight, hands folded like he was conducting an interview rather than meeting my boyfriend for the first time.
“And what do you do again?” my father asked.
“I manage a logistics team,” Thomas said.
Calm. Steady. The same way he was with everything.
Unlike me.
I was a bundle of nerves.
My father nodded once and pursed his lips in that way that meant he was cataloging information, filing it away for later judgment.
But this wasn’t your usual slightly tense introductory dinner.
See, Thomas and I were in our mid-thirties.
He’d been married before, and he had a six-year-old son, Caleb.
Dad didn’t like that.
Caleb sat beside Thomas, legs swinging slightly under the chair, eyes moving between the adults like he was watching a tennis match.
He didn’t speak unless spoken to. He rarely did around new people.
The silence stretched.
I reached for my water glass just to have something to do with my hands.
The movement caught my father’s attention. His gaze fixed on me.
“So…” my father glanced between Caleb and me. “He’s very quiet.”
My father hummed, unconvinced.
I carried the dishes to the kitchen so I could escape the tension at the table, even if only for a few minutes.
But Dad followed me.
“Julie, a word.”
I braced myself.
He leaned against the counter, arms crossed over his chest.
“She left when he was little.”
My father raised his eyebrows.
“Left?”
“She walked out when he was a toddler.
He barely remembers her. Just that she stopped coming back.”
“Yes.”
My father shook his head slowly. “That’s not natural.”
I counted to ten in my head.
“But where’s the mother now?” he pressed.
“She died a few years ago, before I met Thomas.
Car accident.”
That seemed to satisfy something in him, though not in a good way. Like it confirmed whatever theory he’d already built in his mind.
“So now you’re playing house with a widower’s child.”
I turned to face him fully. “I’m marrying a man I love.”
“And inheriting someone else’s mess.”
Dad shook his head again, that practiced gesture of disappointment I’d seen so many times before.
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