Four dads, few beers in, and a question nobody won.

Four of us, few beers in, and somehow we ended up on one of those topics that has no business coming up on a Friday night but won't let go once it does. If you got a terminal diagnosis (God forbid), would you let your teenage kid go through the whole thing with you? The appointments, the decline, the long goodbye. Or would you disappear, cut everyone off, and spare them the front row seat to that?

We split right down the middle.

Two of us said leaving would be the most cowardly thing a father could do,  that your kid is owed that time with you, however ugly it might get. The other two said there's something almost noble about walking away clean. That watching your dad die slowly does something to a child that never fully heals. Nobody won. We just kind of ran out of beer and went home. Hopefully none of us ever actually has to make that call. That conversation never left me though. It kept coming back in the car, at night, in the middle of other things. Eventually the only way I knew how to deal with it was to write a character who actually had to make that choice. That became False Orbit. And honestly, even after writing the whole book, I still don't know who was right.