After my wife d!ed, I rejected her son because he wasn’t mine

It was a portrait.
Of me.
Exactly as I looked the day I kicked him out: a hard face, empty eyes, the shadow of a door closing behind me.
But next to that figure, painted with an almost invisible stroke, was an outstretched hand. Mine.

He wasn’t touching the child, but he was there, as if he could still reach him.

“I never finished this painting,” Ethan said. “I painted it for years, trying to understand if at that time it hated me… or was just broken.”

I remained silent. Tears began to fall unbidden.

“I didn’t know you could paint,” I murmured.

He smiled sadly.
“You didn’t know how to love either. I suppose we both learned late.”

We stood there, looking at each other, with an ocean of years between us.