Saying that word cost me more than anything I’d said in years, and I want to be honest about why.

It was not that I was afraid Warren would be unkind to Keegan, or unsafe.

It was that I was afraid he’d be wonderful.

I had spent fourteen years as the only father Keegan had, and somewhere in me lived a small, ugly fear I’d never said out loud: that the day the boy met the real thing — the successful one, the one with the suit and the firm and the matching eyes — he’d look at the mechanic who’d raised him and see, for the first time, everything I wasn’t.

That blood would speak louder than fourteen years of packed lunches.