"You are not half my kid."
"You're not even my real dad!"
The words hung in the front hallway. Eric felt them land somewhere very deep, in a place he had been guarding since September. Tyler's face went white the moment he'd said it, as if he had heard it for the first time when it was already out in the air.
For a long moment Eric could not breathe. Then he said, very quietly, "Go to Tucson, Tyler. Drive safe."
He turned and walked into the kitchen. Behind him he heard the front door close, too gently, and then the cough and rumble of the old truck starting in the driveway and pulling away.
He went to the play. He sat in a folding chair in the elementary school cafeteria between Melissa and his mother, and when Lily stepped forward in her green felt and pool noodles and shouted, "I can live for two hundred years!" so loudly that the microphone squealed, he clapped until his hands stung. Afterward Lily ran to him with her arms spread wide, the noodle arms bobbing, and asked where Tyler was, and he said Tyler was at a soccer thing, and she said, "Oh," and her face fell for just a second before she got distracted by a cookie.
* * *