There was no ceremony.

One of them just said it — I think it was at a supermarket, one of them strapped in the cart pointing at a box of cereal and saying Dad, Dad, that one — and the word landed on me and stuck and turned out to fit better than my own name.

I remember standing in that cereal aisle with my heart going sideways, because I understood in that second that the distance was gone, that I had quietly become the thing I’d been pretending to hold a place for, and that there was no going back to being an uncle now even if their father walked through the door.

Which he never did.

He missed the day his daughter first called me Dad in a grocery store.

He missed all of it.