He treated his own sorrow like a disease he had to cure. He used your voice as the scalpel to cut it out of himself. At twelve years old, Mr. Hayes. He practiced not feeling.” The Generational Poison I sat in the dark of my room, tears finally spilling over my own eyes, hot and useless.

The irony was a suffocating weight. I was crying now, an old man drowning in regret, while my son was trapped in the concrete tomb I had built for him, entirely unable to join me. “I can’t live with a statue anymore,” Jennifer said, her tone dropping into a flat, exhausted finality.

“I’m leaving him. Not because I hate him, but because staying with him is slowly turning me into stone, too. I need my daughter to grow up in a house where people laugh, where people cry, where people are actually alive.” “Where is he now?” I managed to choke out, my throat tight.

“He’s downstairs,” she said quietly. “He watched me pack my bags. He didn’t try to stop me. He didn’t ask me to stay. He just stood by the door with that same manual-reading face.” But it was her final words before she hung up the phone that shattered whatever was left of my life.

“The worst part, Mr. Hayes, isn’t what he did to me. It’s what he just did to our daughter. While I was packing the last suitcase, Lily started sobbing. She’s only six. She was terrified, crying because her mommy was leaving. Your son walked into the room, stood over her, and looked down at his own weeping daughter.

Do you know what he said to her?” I couldn’t answer. I could only shake my head in the dark. “He looked at her,” Jennifer whispered, “and he said, ‘Stop it. Hayes women don’t cry.

Not here.’ He’s already passing it on. The poison you gave him is already killing my daughter.” The line went dead.

I have spent the last three weeks dialing my son’s number over and over again. Every single time, it goes straight to voicemail. I leave messages begging him to talk to me, telling him that I was wrong, telling him that it’s okay to break, that it’s okay to weep, that I am so deeply, deeply sorry.

But the voicemails remain unreturned. I know why. He isn’t ignoring me out of anger or spite.