The long-suffering father.

It must be exhausting, playing the martyr all these years.” My jaw tightened, and I felt the old anger surge up, fifteen years of it, ready to answer her.

But across the room, over Laura’s shoulder, Samantha caught my eye, and she gave me the smallest shake of her head.

Wait.

Not yet.

Hold.

So I swallowed the reply I wanted to give, every bitter word of it, and I said only, again, “This is Samantha’s wedding, Laura.” It cost me something to do that, more than Laura will ever know.

She had called me a martyr, had mocked the fifteen years I had spent raising her abandoned children as a performance of nobility, had tried to reframe my sacrifice as vanity, and everything in me wanted to answer, to defend those years, to make her understand what they had actually been.