“Does he hate me?” Julian asked, his voice barely above a whisper. “Does he think I abandoned him?”

“No,” I lied gently. “He just thinks it wasn’t meant to be.” But the truth was, Liam carried a quiet, unspoken wound.

You don’t grow up fatherless without developing a callous over the empty space where a dad should have been.

“Can I see him?” Julian asked. “Not in person. Just… a picture.”

My hands trembled as I unlocked my phone. I opened my favorites folder and clicked on a photo from last Christmas. Liam was standing by the tree, his arm wrapped around his fiancée, flashing that crooked, slightly left-leaning smile. He was wearing a dark green sweater, his hair messy, looking so much like the man sitting across from me that it was haunting.

I pushed the phone across the table.

Julian stared at the screen for a long, agonizing time. His chest heaved. He reached out, his thick finger hovering just millimeters above the glass, tracing the outline of his son’s face without actually touching it. He made a sound—a low, broken noise in the back of his throat—and buried his face in his arms right there on the diner table, weeping with the kind of absolute devastation that breaks a person in half.

I didn’t reach across to comfort him. I couldn’t. I was drowning in my own ocean of regret. If I had just gotten out of the car. If I had just walked up those three flights of stairs thirty years ago and handed him that photograph. We wouldn’t be sitting in a rundown diner, mourning the ghost of a life we were supposed to share.

When Julian finally sat up, his eyes were red and swollen. He pushed the phone gently back to my side of the table.

“He’s beautiful,” he said. “He looks strong.”

“He is.”

Julian wiped his face with a paper napkin. “I won’t blow up his life, Chloe. I swear to God. I won’t suddenly appear and demand to be his father. I lost that right when I got on that plane, no matter what Rachel lied about.”

“Julian—”