Today, they looked like evidence of everything I might have lost if I hadn’t forgotten my pills.
My phone buzzed with a text from Michael.
Have a great trip, Dad. Call me when you board.
My stomach twisted.
I stared at the screen until it dimmed. Then I typed back with a thumb that felt disconnected from the rest of my body.
Will do. Love you.
The lie tasted like metal.
During the long travel day, Chicago gave way to airports and boarding lines and the artificial brightness of fluorescent lights. By the time I landed in Miami, the air was thick with warmth, the kind that wraps around your skin like damp fabric. Palm trees swayed beyond the terminal windows, and the sky was so bright it looked almost aggressive after Chicago’s gray.
I rode another taxi toward the port, watching sunshine glint off car roofs and water. Biscayne Bay spread out blue and endless. People laughed in convertibles, bare arms resting on windows, as if life was light and simple.
In the back seat, I sat very still and tried to understand how I had arrived here.
I had been a careful man once.
I married young, at twenty. I worked as an accountant for years, steady and responsible, saving every spare dollar to build stability. When my wife got sick, my life narrowed to hospital visits and paperwork and holding Michael’s hand while he tried not to cry.
When she died, Michael was twelve.
I remember the way his shoulders folded when he heard the news. I remember the sound of his sobs, raw and animal, the kind of sound a child makes when something is too big for their body.
I promised him then that he would never go without.
I kept that promise. I sold my car. I pawned what little I owned that had value. I took contract work so I could be home when he left for school and when he came back. I sat at our kitchen table with a second-hand laptop, doing freelance accounting for small businesses on the South Side while other men my age played golf or took vacations with their wives.
I never complained. I never handed Michael a list of what I’d sacrificed. I believed love was supposed to be quiet.
Maybe that had been my mistake.
Michael met Clare five years ago and married her not long after. I had been genuinely happy at first. I pictured Sunday dinners, grandkids, a bustling house filled with noise again.
Instead, Clare arrived with polite contempt in her eyes, the kind that never raises its voice but still makes you feel smaller. And Michael, my Michael, began to change.
The signs had been there. The day I showed up unannounced and found him pacing his townhouse, shouting into his phone about money. The way he hung up the moment he saw me, smile snapping into place as if he could paste over panic.
“Work stress,” he’d said.
The time I overheard Clare telling a friend that if her father-in-law didn’t live so close, they’d “finally have space.” Michael laughed it off when I mentioned it.
“She doesn’t mean it,” he’d said. “She just vents.”
I had filed every warning under the same label: Don’t be paranoid, Robert.
Now, as the taxi rolled toward the port, I understood what my denial had cost.
The cruise terminal rose ahead, crowded and bright. Families posed for photos with palm trees behind them. Children ran in swim shirts, dragging small suitcases that bounced over the pavement. Couples kissed and laughed with that particular vacation looseness, already forgetting their work lives.
And towering above it all was the ship.
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