Grace wouldn’t look at me when she said his name.
“Dad… his name is Mark.”
The room tilted.
Mark had been my best friend.
We grew up together. Went to the same schools. Opened the shoe shop side by side before he walked away from the business — and from my life — saying he needed “something different.”
I never knew why.
My voice barely worked.
“You mean… Mark Mark?”
She nodded, tears spilling.
“He found me online. A year ago. He said he didn’t know Mom was sick. That he didn’t know about me until it was too late.”
A year.
She’d been carrying this alone for a year.
“He says he wants to make things right,” she whispered. “He says he’s my real father.”
I sat there, staring at the table Laura once leaned over, laughing while tasting gravy.
I didn’t yell.
I didn’t beg.
I just said the hardest thing I’ve ever said:
“I won’t stop you from knowing where you come from.”
Grace broke then, sobbing.
“But you’re my dad,” she cried. “I don’t want to lose you.”
I pulled her into my arms.
“You never will.”
She did go meet him.
She didn’t move out.
She didn’t change her last name.
A few weeks later, Mark came to the shop.
He couldn’t look me in the eye.
“I owe you everything,” he said.
“No,” I replied quietly. “You owe her honesty. And distance.”
Grace still comes home every night.
And every time she calls me “Dad,” I know something Mark never understood:
Being a father isn’t about blood.
It’s about who stays when everyone else disappears.