« Kaylee asked him. »
The announcer lifted the mic. « Number seventeen, Kaylee Brandt, escorted by her grandfather, Mr. Duane Ostrem. »
And they began to walk. Cane. Step. Step. The whole gym rose, section by section, until nearly everyone stood.
Travis didn’t clap. His jaw tightened, he gripped the railing, and he took his first step down from the bleachers.
Chapter 2: Why He Said No
I need to tell you about Travis, because for forty-eight hours I had been quietly furious at a man I did not fully understand.
I thought his « that walk is for real fathers » was coldness, or pride, or some stubborn technicality about bloodlines.
It was none of those things. It was fear, and it had a history I knew but hadn’t connected.
Travis was raised by a stepfather. His own dad left when he was five, and his mother remarried a man named Hollis who, for Travis’s entire childhood, never once let him forget he was a guest in the family — « you’re not really mine, » the casual cruelties, the birthday cards signed with a first name instead of « Dad, » the being left off the family-tree project at school. Travis grew up as the kid who didn’t quite belong in his own house.
So Travis had built a rule for himself out of that wound, the way wounded people do, and the rule was this: he would never, ever force himself into a child’s life as the « real » thing and then turn out not to be wanted. He would rather hang back forever than claim a title and watch a kid flinch away from it the way he’d wanted to flinch from Hollis.
