He Missed the Race, the Ribbon, the Science Olympiad, and Every Birthday, Then Tried to Buy It All Back With a Laptop Left on the Porch — My Son Carried It Back Outside Still Sealed and Said an Expensive Gift Doesn’t Return a Childhood

That distinction was the thing that took me longest to be able to bear, because an absent father is at least a simple grief.

If Marcus had been incapable — cold by nature, or working three jobs, or simply the sort of man who did not know how to be close to a child — then Ethan’s childhood would have been a straightforward kind of sad, the sad of a boy who wanted more than his father had to give.

But that was not our situation, and Ethan knew it was not, which was the wound underneath the wound.

He could see, with his own eyes, that his father was fully capable of the thing he was being denied.