Emily laughed.
“Very badly at first.”
“That’s why we kept locking ourselves in here,” Mike said.
Lily handed me the box.
On top, written in uneven letters, were the words:
ALL OF OUR FAMILY STORIES MATTER.
I looked at Mike.
“You told them not to tell me.”
He nodded.
“We wanted to surprise you.”
“And the secret?”
“Mother’s Day.”
I sat down on the bathroom floor.
For days, I had been watching every movement, every whisper, every locked door, convinced there was something I was not seeing.
There was.
But it was nothing like what I had feared.
Mike had not been trying to erase the man who came before him.
He had been teaching my daughters that loving their stepfather did not mean forgetting their biological father.
That afternoon, I learned something I would never forget.
A good stepfather does not demand that children erase their past to make room for him.
