Chapter 10 — Fevers and Broken Hearts

The visible things were the plays and the graduations.

But fatherhood, I learned, mostly happens in the parts no one applauds.

It happens at two in the morning, walking the floor with a feverish six-year-old draped over your shoulder, singing the only three songs you know on a loop until the fever breaks or the sun comes up, whichever comes first.

It happens sitting on the edge of a bed with a heartbroken fifteen-year-old who has just learned that people you love can leave — a lesson I would have given anything to spare all three of them, given how they came to me — holding her while she cried about a boy, and not saying the true thing, which was that this was practice, that the world would ask her to survive worse, and that she would.

It happens in the ordinary daily work of noticing: which one has gone quiet, which one is pretending to be fine, which one needs you to sit in the room without talking and which one needs you to ask.