“Are you all right?”

“No.”

He didn’t offer reassurance.

For a moment, he looked like the father I remembered from childhood, sitting at the table while I struggled with a school assignment.

He’d never been especially sentimental.

When I was twelve, he once made me rewrite a mathematics explanation because I’d reached the correct answer through a method I couldn’t explain.

I was furious.

He told me that understanding the steps mattered more than guessing the result.