“How am I supposed not to?” I whispered back. “That’s my father. And what he just said… seriously?”
“I know,” he replied softly. “But life gets easier when you stop carrying every ugly comment people throw at you.”
I hated how calm he was about it. Mostly because I knew what he wasn’t saying aloud:
I’m used to this.
I’ve heard worse.
When people mock you your whole life, eventually it stops surprising you.
Seeing my own parents treat the man I loved with such effortless cruelty shattered something inside me.
None of it mattered to them — not that Jordan was a gifted architect, not that he treated me with more kindness than anyone else ever had.
And the insults never stopped.
One evening over dinner, Jordan shared that he’d grown up in an orphanage because his biological parents abandoned him. I expected compassion, maybe even admiration for everything he’d achieved despite that beginning.
