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The Half-Life of Apologies

drama◐ Mature
5 contributors · 3 paragraphs deep

Dana told Frank the truth. She knew what he'd done, and she wasn't dragging his son into this room without a real reason. "Then give me a reason to give him," Frank said. "Help me write it down before my hands stop working."

Frank couldn't finish the reason. Halfway through he started crying and couldn't stop. "There isn't one," he admitted. "I just don't want to die as the only person who remembers I was ever his dad." Dana wrote that down. It was the first true thing he'd said.

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Dana brought that exact line to Eli herself. He read it twice. "He's right that he was my dad," Eli said quietly. "That's the part I could never figure out how to hate clean." He didn't visit. But he stopped pretending the man had never existed.

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Hana Kim
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