Over time, more followed.
Loans I co-signed. Promises that disappeared. Savings drained slowly through emergencies that never truly ended. Eventually, my credit collapsed after Julian defaulted on a large television financing agreement he had begged me to help secure.
Still, I kept trying.
That is the difficult thing about parental love. A father does not stop seeing the child he once carried simply because the grown man standing before him has changed.
I kept searching for the boy who once reached for my hand. I kept hoping that if I gave enough, endured enough, forgave enough, he would wake up and remember who I was.
But mercy without boundaries does not always soften another person. Sometimes it only teaches them that your pain has no price.