Angela’s patience frayed one evening like a thread pulled too long. The house was quiet except for the soft shuffle of Gektor’s slippers in the hallway and the kettle whispering on the stove. She turned to her husband with eyes that had stopped asking and started demanding.
“Send your father to a nursing home,” she said, each word clipped and clean, “or I leave.”
Stefan didn’t answer. Love has a way of cleaving a person in two, and he felt the split—between the woman he married and the man who had once carried him on his shoulders through summer fairs. He nodded, not in agreement but in acknowledgement, and the conversation ended with the click of the bedroom door.
At dawn he moved quietly, the way a son does when he’s carrying more than a suitcase. He helped Gektor into his coat, tucked his scarf beneath his beard, and said, “Let’s go for a drive, Dad.”
In the car, streetlights faded into a pale morning. Gektor watched the neighborhoods roll by and understood without being told. “It’s alright,” he said gently, laying a hand on Stefan’s arm. “You have your own life now. I won’t make this harder.”
Stefan’s jaw tightened. He turned onto the highway, not toward the nursing home Angela had circled on a brochure, but toward the airport. When the terminal’s glass roof fanned out above them, he finally spoke.
“I’m not sending you anywhere,” he said, voice steady. “I’m taking you to Alex.”
The boarding passes were already printed. By noon, the two of them were stepping into the warm chaos of Alex’s kitchen, where the smell of cinnamon and pancakes clung to the air and two boys launched themselves at their grandfather with the bravado of pirates.
“Grandpa! You’re here!”
Alex folded Stefan into a hug that said everything brothers say without words. His wife wiped her hands on a towel and welcomed them twice—once out loud, once with the kind of smile that makes people feel less alone. Gektor stood in the middle of it all, letting the sound of it—laughter, clattering plates, the thud of small feet—settle somewhere he’d kept empty since his wife died. Peace arrived quietly and sat down beside him.
Back in the old house, Angela opened the front door to find absence waiting. The bed was made. The closet half-empty. On the kitchen table lay a single envelope with her name in Stefan’s handwriting.
He wrote plainly. He always had. Your father is not a burden. Mine is not either. I was raised to believe respect is the foundation of a family. If we can’t agree on that, we don’t have a family to save.
The paper trembled in her hands. Anger came first, then the cold surprise of discovering a boundary where she hadn’t expected one. By the time the anger cooled, there was no one left to talk to.
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