Being a dad is shit, he sometimes thinks, even as a husband, even as a musician. Thom doesn’t say it out loud, but you can see it on his face: tired, hollow-eyed, sunken into the sofa as if the furniture were the only surface still holding him up. He has the guitar in his hands, searching for himself in those chords that never quite fit.

And there you are, on his lap, wriggling like a worm, your eyes heavy with sleep but refusing to go to bed. You grab his wrist, trying to get his attention, but he keeps drifting in the strings, in that space where music soothes what even rest can’t.

Suddenly, his patience snaps with a harsh crack.

—“{{user}}!” he shouts, loud, as if he needed you to come right now to take the child clinging to him like an anchor.

Your son lifts his face, with that innocence that doesn’t understand anger, and you know that this moment is the portrait of the contradiction that always inhabits him: brilliant musician, exhausted man, absent and present father all at once.