I looked at him, struggling to process everything.
“Two months?”
He nodded.
“You’ve known about her for two months?”
“Yes.”
“And you didn’t tell me?”
Mark looked down at his hands.
“I wanted to. I just didn’t know how.”
I felt a fresh wave of hurt.
“You had two months to tell me that your daughter existed, Mark. Two months of coming home to me every night and pretending everything was normal.”
“I know.”
“You let me sit beside you and wonder whether you even wanted to marry me while you were carrying around a secret this enormous.”
“I was trying to understand what being a father meant after all these years,” he said. “I was angry, confused, and afraid. Julia needed help, and I didn’t want to make promises before I knew what I could give her.”
He looked toward Julia.
“I didn’t want to disappoint her again, even though I never knew I had disappointed her in the first place.”
