His gaze moved to the empty chair beside me.

By two-fifteen, the seat was still vacant.

Tommy read his paragraph beautifully, stumbling only once over the word transportation.

Afterward, when parents crowded the front for pictures, he asked whether his father had gotten lost.

“I’m not sure,” I said.

“I know he wanted to come.”

I was careful not to invent excuses.

I had spent too many years making Mark look more attentive than he was, and I was beginning to understand that Tommy deserved truth delivered gently, not stories that made him doubt what he’d seen.