“So instead of talking to me, you talked to my eight-year-old son.”
“I was afraid,” he said. “That’s not an excuse. I know that now.”
“Whatever you need.”
He lowered his head.
“And understand me clearly,” I went on. “Tyler will know the truth when I decide he’s ready.”
“I agree,” he said quickly. “Whatever you need.”
“He is eight years old. He is not the bridge you get to walk across to me.”
I kept seeing something familiar.
“He isn’t,” he said. “He won’t be. I promise you.”
For most of my life, other people had decided which truths I could handle. My parents had done it out of love. This man had done it out of fear. Either way, I had been the last person allowed to know my own story.
That ended tonight.
Mr. Lewis reached across the table and covered my hand with his.
“I don’t know if I want you in Tyler’s life.”
“All this time,” he said quietly. “You coming into my shop. Tyler sitting in my chair. I kept seeing something familiar in both of you and telling myself I was imagining it.”
“Why?”
His mouth tightened. “Because hoping you were my sister and being wrong would’ve meant losing you twice.”
We sat like that for a long time. Somewhere between anger and exhaustion, something in me loosened — not all the way, but enough.
“Give me your number.”
“I don’t know if I can forgive you, Dad,” I said finally. “And I don’t know if I want you in Tyler’s life.”
His face tightened, but he nodded.
“I understand.”
“Give me your number.”
He looked up.
“If there’s another conversation, I’ll be the one who starts it. You don’t come here. You don’t wait for Tyler at the park. You don’t contact him at all.”
“Then I live with that.”
“I understand.”
“And if I never call?”
He swallowed. “Then I live with that.”
I nodded. “Good.”
I turned to my brother. I looked at him across the table.
“All these years, Tyler kept coming home talking about Mr. Lewis.”
He gave me a tired little smile.
I didn’t promise to use it.
“Good things, I hope.”
“Mostly the lollipops.”
He laughed, and somehow that nearly broke me.
“I’m glad it was you,” I said. “Of all the people who could’ve turned out to be my brother… I’m glad it was you.”
The first pale light of dawn touched the window. The old man wrote his number on the back of an envelope and slid it across the table.
