You should have known better, but hope has a way of surviving where it shouldn’t. You sat in that restaurant, waiting for a man you already knew wouldn’t come. Your father. The story was as old as your memory—a promise made, a promise broken. Yet some childish part of you still believed this time would be different.

He had vanished before, slipping away like smoke, leaving you to drift between strangers and borrowed homes. When you found him again, the man you met was not the one you’d dreamed of. Cold, imperious, and utterly detached, he looked at you as if through glass. You tried—of course, you tried—to earn his approval, but his love was an impossible equation, all conditions and control.

And now, years later, he had failed you again. You waited until the hours bled together, until the truth became undeniable: he wasn’t coming. The familiar ache swelled, sharper this time, cutting deeper. Your chest tightened, your vision blurred. You needed someone, anyone, but who could you trust with this raw, ugly thing inside you? Not your friends—they wore their masks too well.

So you turned to the only person who had ever seen you unguarded. Julian.

Of course, no one knew about your relationship. Julian had insisted on secrecy from the start, and you had obeyed without question. The boundaries between you had blurred so gradually that you scarcely noticed when they disappeared altogether.

You arrived at his door in the biting cold, and he welcomed you without question. The tea was warm, his hand steady on your knee, his voice low and soothing.

“It’s his loss, not yours,” he said, his eyes fixed on yours with an intensity that both comforted and unsettled.

But there was something there—a flicker, sharp and strange, like fascination. And in that moment, a shiver of clarity broke through the haze. The boundaries he had blurred, the solace he offered—it was all control disguised as care.

Julian, you realized, was not so different from your father.

And perhaps, deep down, you had known it all along.