Then I gently closed his fingers around them.
“I’ve wanted a car for two years.”
I turned toward Ray.
“But I wanted a dad for fourteen.”
Nobody said anything.
My biological father stared at me.
“So you’re choosing him?”
I shook my head.
“No.”
Then I said the words that finally ended his little competition.
**“He chose me.”**
My biological father eventually drove away with the car.
Ray went straight back inside.
Ten minutes later, I found him standing at the kitchen sink washing our birthday breakfast dishes as though nothing extraordinary had happened.
“Ray.”
“What?”
“Thank you.”
“For what?”
“The box. The account. Everything.”
He shrugged.
I asked him the same question I had asked before.
“You didn’t have to do any of that. So why did you?”
For once, he had no joke.
He looked down at the sink for a moment.
Then he gave the simplest answer
