He stared at it for a full ten seconds before he breathed.
Then he read it again.
“Your son’s party is cancelled,” my dad texted, like he was rescheduling a haircut, not erasing my boy’s 10th birthday.
Years of training rose up in him before anger did.
That was the embarrassing part.
His first instinct was not to rage.
It was to solve.
That was what his family had made of him.
A data architect by trade, a crisis manager by bloodline, and the person everyone called when their lives stopped adding up.
Timothy had been thirty-two for only four months, but he felt older on family days.
He had been a single father long enough to understand what fatigue did to a person, and he had been a son long enough to understand what guilt did when parents learned how to use it as currency.
His younger brother Benjamin had always been the charming disaster.
Three years younger, louder, smoother, and able to turn a mistake into a performance so convincing that their parents applauded while Timothy paid the invoice.
Benjamin missed rent.
Timothy helped.
Benjamin’s car died.
Timothy helped.
Benjamin needed money for wedding deposits, then honeymoon overflow, then twin expenses, then insurance, then the car note that was only supposed to be temporary.
