“I’m sorry I got to have to leave,” he said. I regret that I was so silent and that I let you grow up in a house where the insults had become commonplace.
He put the box in the trunk.
“But I don’t regret that I finally said that it’s enough.
Denis smiled.
- Neither do I.
That night, Vasile returned to his cottage next to the workshop. He prepared his dinner, opened the window and sat at the kitchen table.
On the wall hung a photo of Denis, taken the day he entered college. Next to it was an older photo, in which Vasile was holding his son by the front of the newly built house.
He looked at the pictures and smiled.
He didn’t have a perfect life. He had not recovered the lost years, nor could he erase all the words that had hurt him.
