The clouds looked soft from a distance.
They always did.
Drifting in slow, endless stretches outside the oval window, glowing gold where the late sun touched them. Peaceful. Untouched. Like nothing complicated had ever existed above or below them.
Dr. Alfred Hofstadter knew better.
He'd spent the entire flight staring at them anyway.
***
He should have stayed.
The thought had followed him from the hospital to the airport, from the airport to the plane, and now sat with him in seat 14A like an unwanted companion that refused to leave.
He should have stayed with his son.
Leonard Hofstadter had been pale. Smaller, somehow, in that hospital bed. Not physically — not really — but in a way that mattered more.
Like something in him had folded inward.
***
And Alfred had left.
Because she told him to.
Beverly Hofstadter hadn't raised her voice. She never did. She hadn't needed to.
"Your work remains a higher priority in terms of long-term stability outcomes."
That was how she had said it.
Not please stay productive. Not we'll manage here.
A conclusion. A statement. A fact, in her world.
Work was more important than their son.
And for a moment — a brief, shameful moment — Alfred had listened.
Years of conditioning didn't break in a day.
***
He exhaled slowly, his breath fogging the window for a second before disappearing.
The thoughts hadn't stopped since.
Not during the conference.
Not during the meetings.
Not even when he was speaking.
They threaded through everything — quiet, persistent, impossible to ignore.
***
He had tried.
God, he had tried.
Tried to understand her. To meet her where she stood. To accept that her way of thinking — clinical, detached, precise — was simply… different, not wrong.
She had justified it, of course.
She always did.
Research.
Observation.
Data integrity.
He had even believed her once.
Until he saw the manuscript.
His jaw tightened at the memory.
It hadn't been hidden.
Beverly didn't believe in hiding things — only in categorizing them.
The draft had been sitting neatly on her desk, pages aligned, notes in the margins in her sharp, deliberate handwriting.
He hadn't meant to read it.
Not at first.
Just the title.
That had been enough.
Needy Baby, Greedy Baby.
His fingers curled slightly against the armrest.
Their children.
Their children.
Reduced to case studies.
Behavioral patterns.
Subjects.
It hadn't even been the first time.
There was already a book.
Published.
Circulated.
Respected in academic circles.
Disappointing Child.
And in its pages—
Leonard Hofstadter.
Angelina.
Even Michael.
Michael, who was still too young to properly form sentences, let alone consent to being analyzed, dissected, and printed for the world to consume.
For God's sake.
Alfred closed his eyes briefly.
He had told himself, back then, that it was for science.
That the insights might help others.
That intention mattered more than discomfort.
He had told himself a lot of things.
None of them felt true anymore.
Leonard's fall hadn't been random.
He could see that now with painful clarity.
The anger.
The quiet desperation.
The way the boy tried so hard to earn something that should have been freely given. Love. Attention. Approval. And what had he received instead? Evaluation. Correction. Documentation.
Alfred swallowed hard.
No child should have to perform to be loved.
No child should feel like a hypothesis waiting to be proven.
And yet that was exactly what his son had become.
The plane shifted slightly, a subtle tremor passing through the cabin.
No one reacted.
The passengers around him continued as they were — reading, sleeping, existing in their own small worlds.
Alfred barely noticed.
His world had narrowed to a single, unavoidable conclusion.
He was done. Not in anger. Not in some loud, dramatic declaration. Just… done. Done asking. Done adjusting. Done pretending this was acceptable. He would tell her. About the offer. The promotion. Senior Anthropologist. The transfer to California.
But more than that—
He would tell her what needed to change.
Not her mind.
Not her work.
But her boundaries.
Their children were not research material.
They were not subjects.
They were not data points to be refined and published.
They were his children.
And they deserved to be loved like it.
If she refused?
The thought lingered, heavy but no longer unthinkable.
Then he would still change things.
He would show them love.
Openly. Consistently. Without permission.
No more careful glances over his shoulder.
No more quiet restraint.
No more letting them grow up believing affection was something scarce.
He turned his head slightly, looking back out at the clouds.
Still soft.
Still distant.
Still deceptive.
He had spent years believing endurance was strength.
That silence was stability.
That waiting was the same as protecting.
He had been wrong.
Below him, the world stretched wide and indifferent.
Ahead of him, decisions waited.
Difficult ones.
Necessary ones.
And for the first time in a long while, Alfred Hofstadter wasn't thinking about what was logical.
He was thinking about what was right.