Justin leaned forward, elbows on knees, and buried his face in his hands. He wasn’t the victim of a hard life—he was the architect of it. All the drinking, the drifting, the decades wasted—no one had robbed him. He’d been running from the mirror all along.
There was no redemption arc here. No last-minute twist. Just a man who’d burned every bridge and now stood alone, choking on the smoke. He had come to New York to be saved, but instead found a mirror held up to his soul—and he barely recognized the man looking back.
He thought about the birthdays he’d missed. The school plays. The hospital visits. The nights they cried and the mornings they rose anyway. He had abandoned twelve lives and didn’t even look back. And now that they had flourished, it was clear—they had never needed him to grow.
Lila told her sisters everything that evening. The waiting room confrontation. Justin’s desperation. His excuses. And when Lucy heard it, she didn’t cry. She nodded quietly, eyes heavy, as if some long-closed door had finally been sealed shut for good.
The lack of a father figure had been their wound—but it became their forge. Each of them had learned to fight harder, reach higher, care deeper. Where Justin had collapsed, they had risen. Not in spite of his absence, but because of it. They were strong because they had to be.
And Justin, once the center of his own world, was now nothing more than a shadow at its edge. The man who left. The man who returned too late. And as the world spun forward, he remained still—left behind, with only his regret to keep him company.