They were the best thing life had ever offered him, and he had traded them, unknowing, for the privilege of being right about a lie.

He would never hear Gavin’s first word, because it had already been spoken, years ago, to me, in a base apartment at two in the morning.

He would never teach Lucas to ride a bike, or sit up with a feverish Clara, or learn that Mason hums when he’s concentrating and Audrey will not sleep without the light.

All of that was already spent, already lived, already mine.

The DNA report in his hands could prove he was their father in the only sense a laboratory understands, and it could not give him back a single hour of what that word actually means, because fatherhood is not a fact established by blood; it is a thing built out of exactly the hours he had chosen to spend elsewhere.