She said it like flipping a light switch: “You’re not my dad.”
It didn’t make me mad. It just hollowed me out. Ten years of teaching her to ride a bike, staying up through fevers, attending school plays, bandaging scraped knees, soothing first heartbreaks—and still I was just “Mike.”
“In that case,” I said as calmly as possible, “you can’t use me as a punching bag and expect me to grin through it.”
Her eyes widened. She wasn’t used to me standing up. She rolled them, slammed her door—scene over.
I sat at the kitchen table with a cold cup of coffee and a weight in my chest I couldn’t shake. My wife, Claire, found me there. “She’s hurting,” she said. “At her dad. At you. Maybe even at me—because you stayed.”
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