No running in them now. Fear, yes. Guilt, yes. But not panic. He was choosing to stand in the wreckage instead of sprinting from it.
“I met someone else,” he said.
The kitchen seemed to shrink around the three of us.
Tiny sneezed.
Jace’s mouth twitched, barely, then flattened again. “No, I didn’t plan it. I know that sounds useless. I’m not trying to make it clean. It wasn’t.”
Cal’s reply was too quiet to catch.
Jace looked down at the dog pressed to his shin. “Yeah. I know character matters. I know.”
My stomach pulled tight.
I had spent most of my adult life trying to be the kind of man who did not make messes other people had to clean up. I had failed at that spectacularly. The worst part was not being able to claim ignorance. I had known every line as I crossed it. So had Jace.
That did not make what existed between us less real.
It made the truth heavier.
Jace rubbed at his forehead with the heel of his hand. “It’s a man.”
He said it quietly, but not like an apology.
The silence on the other end stretched long enough that Jace stopped breathing.
I watched his hand on my shirt. Watched the color drain from his knuckles.
Then Cal spoke, sharper than before.
Jace’s face folded with sudden emotion. “No. No, Dad, I’m not hurt. I’m not scared of him. That’s not what this is.”
Another burst of sound from the phone.
“Dad,” Jace said, and it cracked through the middle.
Cal kept talking.
Jace covered his eyes. A rough little laugh slipped out of him, broken at the edges. “I know you don’t care that he’s a man. I mean, I hoped you wouldn’t. I didn’t know how you’d react. I don’t know. I’m sorry.”
He listened.
The tightness in his shoulders eased by degrees.
“Yeah,” he said after a minute. “I should’ve known you’d ask if he was good to me first.”
I looked away.
Not because I didn’t want to hear it. Because the look on Jace’s face was too private, too young and adult at once, a son receiving proof that the floor under him was still there.
Cal didn’t lecture. Not from what I could tell. He asked questions in that clipped, practical way Jace had inherited when he was scared enough to stop joking.
Jace answered all of them.
“Yes, I trust him.”
A pause.
