Daddy

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My parents were both divorced when they met, each carrying the quiet weight of a life that hadn’t turned out the way they’d imagined. My father had been married before, to a sweet woman named Marily—someone he was still, in many ways, hung up on. They had two children together: a son, Jack, and a daughter, Deborah. Not long after the divorce, Marily remarried, and Jack and Debbie began calling her new husband, Ralph, “Dad.” By the time my parents found each other, that word already belonged to someone else, and my father was left standing on the outside of a family that had once been his.