- Did I do enough?
- Did I say the right things at the right time?
- Did they know I loved them, or did they just know I was tired?
I wondered if the girls noticed.
There was a fear under all of it that I never said out loud. That somewhere in the back of their hearts, the triplets were still waiting for their real father.
That I was the man who’d been there, but not the man they wanted.
I didn’t blame them for it. I just couldn’t stop thinking about it.
There was a fear under all of it.
***
The morning of the triplets’ graduation, I sat in my truck in the parking lot for a full 20 minutes before I could make myself get out.
I was 49. My beard had gone gray in patches. My knee hurt from a fall off a ladder two summers earlier and had never quite healed.
