Then he pushed it toward his stepsister.
"She can have mine."
The little girl shook her head quickly.
"No, it's okay."
The boy looked close to tears.
"I don't want extra."
The father reached over and gently moved the plate back.
"Nobody has to give up their dinner tonight."
He looked at both children.
"There's enough food for everybody."
The boy nodded.
Then he began eating.
The father sat between them until their plates were nearly empty.
His wife watched from the other side of the kitchen.
And for the first time since their marriage, the distance between them felt much larger than the width of the dining table.
The father was forty-two years old and had spent most of his adult life learning how to fix things.
Broken electrical panels.
Damaged wiring.
Faulty generators.
Commercial lighting systems that stopped working without warning.
He owned a modest electrical contracting business outside Atlanta, Georgia, where he employed six people and occasionally worked alongside them when a project required another pair of hands.
He wasn't wealthy.
But he was responsible.
The mortgage was current. The children had health insurance. His workers received their wages on time. There was usually food in the refrigerator, even during difficult months.
He believed those things mattered.
He believed keeping his promises mattered even more.
Five years earlier, his first wife had died after a sudden medical emergency, leaving him alone with a five-year-old daughter.
The years afterward had nearly destroyed him.
He remembered standing in their bedroom, holding one of his wife's sweaters, unable to understand how a person could fill a house with life one week and leave it unbearably silent the next.
He remembered his daughter waking at night and calling for her mother.
He remembered learning how to braid hair from tutorial videos, packing school lunches before sunrise, and sitting through parent-teacher meetings feeling as though every other adult knew something he didn't.
There were mornings when he cried alone in his truck before going to work.
There were evenings when his daughter climbed into his lap and told him she missed her mother.