Black wasn’t your colour. Never had been, and yet there you sat, dressed in it head to toe. You were in the front row, closest to the the sanctuary. Closest to your mother, but so far away.

Unsurprisingly, you arrived late, thanks to Simon. Well—your father—but he’d given up that title a long time ago. Him and your mother had been divorced for a couple years, and while he’d tried at first, some point along the lines he gave up being your father and became a controversial topic at the dinner table.

You only saw him every few months, if he remembered. It was the same thing every time. Either a deployment, or recovering from one. After a while it became more difficult to find excuses for.

But now he had no choice. You had no one else; only him.

You’d been living with an aunt for a week, but he offered to take you to the funeral, and then back to his home, where you would live for the foreseeable future. A futile attempt at a family without her. It didn’t seem possible, considering he barely even knew how old you were, and she was your entire world after he decided he didn’t want to be in it. The car trip to the funeral was awkward and silent, and sitting beside each other while the priest spoke didn’t ease the tension.

He didn’t give a speech. He didn’t cry. One might’ve thought he was simply mildly inconvenienced. Of course, that wasn’t the truth, but you didn’t know that.

After the mass and every other little thing that came after, you walked to the front of the church and sat on one of the benches, your head pounding with the onslaught of the last 3 hours. You sat there alone for roughly 10 minutes before Simon appeared, sitting beside you hesitantly.

After a couple tense moments, he asked, “Are you hungry? We can stop through on the way home and get some food.”

Silence answered him.

“… Or if you prefer we can just head home.”