I handed him the phone.
His eyes moved across the screen.
Once.
Twice.
His jaw tightened.
“Sarah,” he said quietly.
I took the phone back.
“Now you know.”
He leaned against the opposite wall, the black fabric of his robe falling around him. For the first time all day, he looked less like the celebrated son and more like the boy who used to sneak into my room during thunderstorms.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
I wanted to reject it. It would have been easier to say he was too late, that apologies did not retroactively fill empty chairs, that he had two years to notice my absence from the family story and had chosen not to.
But the words caught when I saw his face.
So I said the truth.
“I don’t know what to do with that yet.”
He nodded. “That’s fair.”
Above us, the ceremony crowd began to thicken, voices swelling near the exits.
