"Part of it. But I've been thinking about it a lot these last two months." Eric turned the forty-day chip over in his pocket. He took it out and showed it to Tyler, a scratched aluminum disk, its lettering nearly worn off. "When your mom got pregnant, I told everybody, this baby is the reason I'm going to stay sober. I said it like a prayer. And I thought for a while, since September, that it was all built on nothing. That the reason was a lie."
Tyler looked at the chip in the starlight.
"But that's not true," Eric said. "It wasn't some idea of a baby that kept me sober. It was you. It was getting up at three in the morning with you screaming because your gums hurt. It was you puking in the car on the way to Disneyland. It was you asking me why the sky was blue four hundred times in a row and me having to look it up because I didn't know. It was you. The real you. Not the one on paper. Blood didn't do any of that. You did. And I did. We did it together, every day, for sixteen years. That's the thing no test can see."
Tyler was crying openly now, the way he had not cried in front of Eric since he was little.
"I'm sorry I said you're not my real dad."
"I know."
"You're the realest thing I've got."