Timothy looked at me. “I’m sorry about all of this… genuinely.”
“Hi,” I said.
“Hi,” Timothy replied, offering a faint smile. It was the most grounded exchange that had happened in the last hour, and I appreciated it. Walter clapped his hands together once.
“That’s it?” I asked. Walter smiled at me with the serene confidence of a man who believed he had just done something very clever. Then he walked out.
I left that house confused, annoyed, and thinking about Timothy’s eyes, which I immediately tried to dismiss as irrelevant. Going back wasn’t an option. Becoming part of whatever story Walter thought he was writing wasn’t going to happen.
Two days later, Timothy appeared at the grocery store during my afternoon shift. No suit this time. Just a jacket and a queue number, waiting in my line like anyone else.
When he reached the register, he said, “I figured this was less dramatic than the alternative.”
“The alternative being a motorcade?” I asked. Timothy winced slightly. “That wasn’t my idea.”
“I know.
But you’re still related to a man who turns everything into a full-blown movie scene.”
Timothy handed me his items. “For the record, this isn’t even in Dad’s top five strangest ideas.”
I scanned the last item and found myself laughing despite every intention not to. Timothy and I didn’t fall in love quickly or easily, or the way things happen in movies or in Walter’s crazy imagination.
We talked. A lot. We disagreed about things that mattered and figured out which ones we could work around and which ones we couldn’t.
I told Timothy what Walter’s stunt had actually cost me that month, and he listened without making it about guilt or money. Timothy wasn’t perfect. I wasn’t either.
That’s probably why it worked. Weeks passed. It wasn’t simple.
I didn’t trust Timothy at first, and I trusted his father even less. But slowly, something shifted. I started laughing in a way I hadn’t in a long time.
The kind that comes from your chest without warning. And I realized it was because of who Timothy was when nothing else was involved. Not what he had.
Just who he was. This coming Saturday, we’re getting married! I still find that sentence a little strange to say out loud.
Walter asked if he could walk me down the aisle. He knows my father is no longer with us. “I owe you at least that much,” Walter said, “after all the theatrics.”
He laughed as if that were the funniest thing he’d heard in years.
My mother lives with my aunt now, and she was happier than I’d seen her in years when I told her I was getting married. I’m still not entirely sure I’ve forgiven Walter for that morning. But I’ll work on it.
I never believed in fairy tales growing up. And yet here I am, somehow living the most unexpected, infuriating, and wonderful version of one Walter could’ve invented.
