He framed it.
Graham lost eight years he can’t get back. He has to live with every game he watched from the top of the bleachers instead of the front row. Wyatt didn’t hug him until October. He calls him Graham, not Dad. Some days I think he might never call him anything else. Graham says that’s fair. He says it every time.
Diane lost the quiet life she’d built so carefully. Everybody in Bramble Creek knows now. The fundraiser made sure of that. Her mother didn’t speak to her for a month. She told me once, in my kitchen, that it was the worst year of her life and also the year she stopped being afraid of the pickup line.
I lost the story I’d told my son for five years. The one with a man in it who wasn’t ready. I don’t get to tell it anymore. He knows exactly where he came from now. A catalog. A number. A sentence at the bottom of a page.
