Eight months. He’d been carrying it for eight months and he never said a thing, and he sat at the end of my bed the night before and said please try to understand.
Then he said the last part.
“So when I say my real father is in this gym tonight, I’m not talking about the man in the second row.
“Rory Bassett has been my dad since I was four. He’s the one who’s been sitting behind that bench since I was in seventh grade, and he’s at every single one, and he’s never once yelled at a referee, which honestly is a personal failing.
“He didn’t get me because he wanted a kid. He got me because somebody had to and he was the only person in the room.
“I invited Grady tonight because he wanted a relationship with me, and I decided he should have exactly the one he earned. This is it. This is the whole thing. It’s about ninety seconds long and there are four thousand witnesses.
“Sir, you can go now.”
Grady Wolcott walked out of Dunmoor Coliseum through four thousand people and it took him about forty seconds and nobody said anything to him.
