The Deep

by Nick Cutter

Your child doesn’t owe you loyalty or obedience. You owe your child love and understanding, owe it unconditionally, and if you love them strongly enough, eventually that love may be returned.

Luke found it almost impossible to grapple with his brother’s misanthropy. It wasn’t that he was hateful, as their mother had been—you required a working emotional barometer in order to feel anything at either pole, be it love or hate. Clayton’s barometer was zeroed out. His emotional weather patterns were unvarying. No shutter-rattling storms, no radiant sunlight. Just an endless string of gray, edgeless days.

Being a father was an imperfect science, and its test subjects, that man’s sons and daughters, had to accept their father’s imperfections just as each father must eventually accept those same imperfections within himself.